CitizenM Bowery and the Value of a 151-Square-Foot Hotel Room
THE COURTYARD | photo by Nadia Bouzid
Address: 189 Bowery, New York, NY
Neighborhood: Lower East Side
Opened: September 2018
Developer: citizenM and Brack Capital Real Estate
Architecture and Interior Design: Concrete
Executive Architect: Stephen B. Jacobs Group
General Contractor: The Rinaldi Group
Landscape Architecture: Abel Bainnson Butz
Rooms: 300
Typical Room Size: Approximately 151 square feet
Building Area: Approximately 100,000 square feet
Height: 246 feet
Hospitality Design included citizenM Bowery among its best hotel openings of 2018. The recognition makes sense, but the interiors are only part of the story. The hotel is also a very precise exercise in how much room a traveler needs, where the remaining square footage should go and how 300 nearly identical bedrooms can be constructed on a constrained Manhattan site.
The open common area đź“ŤCitizen M Hotel Bowery | photo by Nadia Bouzid
CitizenM opened its first hotel at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport in 2008 with a different distribution of space. The private room would be compact, but the bed, shower and technology would be good. The space saved upstairs would return downstairs in the form of large living rooms filled with art, books, furniture, food and people.
At the Bowery, that model feels particularly relevant. This is Manhattan, where every square foot has a consequence and nobody comes to New York intending to spend the day beside the minibar. The typical citizenM room measures approximately 14 square meters, or 151 square feet. A king-size bed fills the width beside a large window, and a tablet controls the television, lighting, temperature and shades. There is no attempt to make the room feel like a small apartment. It is a very good place to sleep, shower and look out at the city.
The rest of the hotel begins where the bedroom ends. Concrete, the Amsterdam firm responsible for the architecture and interiors, placed much of the social life downstairs in a double-height living room with bookshelves, long tables, sofas, lamps and smaller seating arrangements. A guest can work without entering a business center, have a drink without sitting in a formal restaurant and spend time alone without feeling stranded in a lobby.
LIGHTING DESIGN đź“ŤCitizen M Hotel Bowery | photo by Nadia Bouzid
The furniture is deliberately mixed. Chairs, tables, books, art and objects sit together more like a private collection than a conventional hotel furniture package. The room is colorful without becoming childish and relaxed without looking careless. CitizenM calls it a living room, and that is what it feels like. The lobby functions more as the entrance to it.
Self-service kiosks handle check-in, and the hotel’s employees move through the space instead of remaining behind a traditional reception desk. The arrangement leaves less room for a counter devoted to transactions and more room for the guests staying there. Technology is not simply another amenity. It changes the amount of space required to operate the hotel.
At the front of the property, an approximately 4,000-square-foot plaza creates a break between the Bowery and the entrance. Designed by Abel Bainnson Butz, it includes trees, planting, benches and wooden seating. A large mural by Jonathan “Meres One” Cohen, the former lead artist of 5Pointz, runs alongside it and leads the eye toward the hotel.
The art continues inside. Photographer Christelle de Castro created 62 portraits of people connected to the surrounding neighborhood. Originally intended for the façade windows, the photographs were later installed as a collage behind the check-in kiosks. The building also contains the Museum of Street Art, which extends through its stairwell with work connected to the artists of 5Pointz.
FUNKY CHAIRS đź“ŤCitizen M Hotel Bowery | photo by Nadia Bouzid
At the top, cloudM occupies an indoor and outdoor rooftop space with views across Manhattan. The bar has floor-to-ceiling windows, oversized chandeliers, colorful Vitra seating and another work by Meres One. Between the plaza, the living room and the rooftop, citizenM has placed some of the hotel’s best square footage outside the bedrooms.
The most consequential design decision is hidden behind the finished walls. CitizenM Bowery was constructed from 210 prefabricated modules manufactured in Poland and transported to Manhattan. Most of the modules contained two guest rooms with a section of corridor between them. They arrived with bathrooms, flooring, windows, doors, mechanical and electrical components, televisions and beds already installed.
The building had originally been designed in poured concrete. After excavation had begun, the plans were reworked for modular construction. The first three floors remained conventionally built, followed by a three-foot-thick concrete slab on the fourth floor. Fifteen levels of guest-room modules were then stacked above it around the concrete elevator and stair core.
At 246 feet, citizenM Bowery became the world’s tallest modular hotel when it opened. The record is interesting, but the relationship between the construction system and the hotel itself is even more relevant. CitizenM was already working with a standardized bedroom that it could repeat across properties. Manufacturing that room in controlled factory conditions and stacking it on a Manhattan site follows the same logic as the brand.
Modular construction did not make the project easy or automatically inexpensive. The rooms still had to cross the Atlantic, arrive in the correct sequence, comply with New York building codes and fit within a structure that had initially been designed for another construction method. The advantage was the ability to complete much of the repetitive room work in a factory as the site work continued in New York.
The numbers behind the plan are revealing without needing to know the final development cost. A hotel of approximately 100,000 gross square feet containing 300 rooms works out to roughly 333 gross square feet per key. The room itself measures approximately 151 square feet. The remaining area accommodates the corridors, service spaces, living room, food and beverage areas, plaza and rooftop.
In March 2018, HSBC refinanced the project with $82.5 million in debt as construction approached completion. That equals approximately $275,000 in financing per hotel key, although the figure should not be mistaken for the hotel’s complete development cost.
For a developer, the real question is not whether 151 square feet sounds small. It is whether the room works well enough that the guest does not resent its size, and whether the square footage removed from the bedroom earns its place elsewhere in the building.
At citizenM Bowery, the room is compact, but the arrival is not. Neither are the living room, the art, the plaza or the rooftop. The hotel does not try to disguise the economics of its location. It turns them into the plan.
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