August 23, 2022 Real Estate
The general manager of the upcoming Warren Street Hotel, Nick Hamdy, invited me up to the Crosby Street Hotel in Soho to introduce himself and run through the program for the hotel (appropriately located on Warren between Greenwich and West Broadway). The hotel is being built by Firmdale Hotels, a London chain of boutique properties, and has had a lot of fits and starts since construction began just before covid. But it is moving quickly now and on track to finish in September or October of 2023.
The façade should be finished by the end of the year — and yes, the window frames are blue. There will be 57 rooms and suites and 12 residences at the top for rent. But they would not provide any other renderings — so I am running the one below from Firmdale owner Kit Kemp’s Instagram.
Like the Crosby (they also have the Whitby in Midtown), there will be a restaurant and bar (they have yet to go to CB1 for a liquor license, since you need to have your certificate of occupancy first) serving breakfast, lunch, tea (“We are a British company”) and dinner, and an “orangerie” — or greenhouse — in the rear yard. There are two terraces, but those are attached to private residences.
The building was originally scheduled to have a much deeper basement, but after damage to the buildings next door, the excavation was halted and the plans modified for a much shallower foundation. As a result, there is no banquet hall, no screening room, etc. (That seems to suit the brand just fine — their hotels are quiet places.) You can see what those windows look like from the inside in the photo from a Crosby Street suite below; a regular room there mid-week in September is $1200.
Paul Underhill, a British hotel operator who has made his career here and has worked with the Kemps for years, found the site for Firmdale, which wanted to round out its New York presence with something in Tribeca. Hamdy has been with Firmdale for 12 years, eight in London at the Charlotte Street Hotel and five as assistant general manager of the Whitby. He said he would be at the next CB1 meeting to introduce himself to neighbors.
A post shared by Kit Kemp’s Design Thread (@kitkempdesignthread)
Shocking! Another arrogant, hubristic, interloping developer damages their neighbors! “The building was originally scheduled to have a much deeper basement, but after damage to the buildings next door, the excavation was halted and the plans modified for a much shallower foundation. As a result, there is no banquet hall, no screening room, etc.”
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