By Kim Askew
Smart industrial design has hit the Ottawa hotel scene. ARC the.hotel, a high-tech hostelry that recently opened on Slater Street, boasts the modern atmosphere and amenities business travellers would expect to find in a major city.
It’s about time.
The dot in ARC the.hotel’s name is a not-so-subtle attempt to brand the hotel as a home-away-from-home for high tech executives seeking an alternative to the old-world opulence of the Chateau Laurier or the business-like briskness of the Ottawa Westin. It’s a niche that’s largely been ignored in Ottawa. Hotels have failed to keep pace with the innovation and sophistication that characterize the burgeoning tech industry.
An ARC employee, clad in a black Holt Renfrew-designed ensemble, opens the door to the hotel’s tempered glass foyer. In the lobby, minimalist limestone floors, dark wood and brushed chrome meet the eye. Toronto design firm Yabu Pushelberg, the team that put Canoe on the top of the list for the Bay Street lunch crowd, has given this project the full treatment. From shelves of orange and purple bound (fake) books in the library to an arrangement of green apples spilling from a steel bowl onto a suede coffee table, the effect is one of casual elegance.
It’s the kind of aesthetic you would expect to see in the pages of the British lifestyle magazine Wallpaper*, a style characterized by monochromatic colour schemes, graphic design elements and luxury brands.
But while the ARC is fresh, it’s not unique.
It owes much to the design of the Mercer hotel that opened two years ago in New York’s upscale SoHo district, hitting the design world by storm with its own indirect lighting, dark wood, brushed chrome, and shelves of identically-bound (real) books.
Of course, ARC the.hotel is an Ottawa hotel. Rates run from around $200 to $300 a night (about a third of the cost of a night at the Mercer). While the doors don’t open onto the kind of sexy Manhattan restaurant district you’d find outside the Mercer’s understated entrance, it is a step towards raising the calibre of Ottawa’s hotels to a standard on par with its technology sector.
The idea behind “branding” a city is to create a tone or atmosphere that visitors will come to associate with the place.
To brand itself as a good place to invest, live, and work, Ottawa needs more hotels that can help make that crucial first impression.