by Zach Mortice
Associate Editor

How do you . . . design a highly sustainable luxury boutique hotel?

Summary: The Proximity Hotel is the first LEED® Platinum-certified hotel in the nation, completed on a modest budget by architects who had never designed a LEED-rated building before. Its design references include 19th century textile mill building typologies and industrial loft spaces. The architects’ client played a strong design role.

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LINKS

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AIA BOOKSTORE

Building Type Basics for Hospitality Facilities, by Brain McDonough, John Hill, Lindsay Pope Brayfield and Associates, Robert Glazier, Winford Buck Lindsay, and Thomas Sykes (John Wiley and Sons, 2001).

PICTURES

All images by Mark File.

1: The Proximity Hotel, the first LEED Platinum-rated hospitality project in the nation, accentuates the sawtooth pattern of its roof-top solar panels.

2: With recycled and locally produced materials, the Proximity does not skimp on client amenities.

3: Harking back to the 19th century, the hotel has a close connection to nature.

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For their sustainable Proximity Hotel project, Centrepoint Architecture in Raleigh were given a typical car-centric quasi-suburban office park site, devoid of both dense urban walkability and a rural light footprint. Firm principal Tom Murphy, AIA, had a hard-charging, budget savvy client in Dennis Quaintance who kept them on a modest $28 million budget for their 147-room boutique hotel. Quaintance, of Quaintance-Weaver Restaurants and Hotels, wanted to build the most sustainable hotel in the nation—a building type that’s often resistant to the green treatment. Centrepoint had never before completed a LEED-certified building.

But, in October of last year Centrepoint and Quaintance were honored with LEED Platinum certification—meeting their goal of creating the most sustainable hotel and restaurant project in the nation and snatching headlines from national hospitality heavyweights, like Starwood Capital Group, that were hoping to take hotel design in an as-yet-uncharted sustainable direction. The Proximity Hotel is an example of how far sustainability can go even within a modest budget and an intense need for market viability. Centrepoint’s resourceful design has made the hotel 39 percent more energy efficient than a comparable facility and cuts water consumption by a third.

19th century form, 21st century sustainability
The 118,000-square-foot hotel is located on a commercial strip office park, about a mile outside of downtown Greensboro, N.C. Its contemporary industrial loft design takes its inspiration (and name) from the Proximity Cotton Mill built in the 1890s in Greensboro. This mill processed cotton into denim, an important industry in 19th century North Carolina. The hotel’s restaurant, Print Works Bistro, is named after the Proximity Print Works, opened in 1912, which printed and finished cotton in multiple colors. The Proximity Hotel’s massing and fenestration proportions reference this textile mill industrial history within the framework of a luxury boutique hotel. The eight-story building is boxy and squat, with large, wide windows. A two-story section that contains the Print Works Bistro (also rated LEED Platinum) and meeting and event spaces is designed to look like an industrial shipping and receiving building. Murphy and his team looked at other mill facilities in North Carolina, apartment and manufacturing buildings in Chicago, and buildings in the Meat Packing District of New York City to focus in on early 20th century detailing that’s the design’s signature.

With a few exceptions, this project doesn’t visually read as “green.” Quaintance explicitly wanted to center visitors’ minds on his property’s luxury experience, not on formal expression of sustainability. “One of the things that he wanted to always emphasize was that there wasn’t any compromise to the guest experience,” says Murphy.

The hotel’s primary façade material is a sandwiched composite pre-cast concrete that consists of 2.5 inches of concrete on the outside, a 3.5 inch foam core, and 4 inches of concrete on the rear. Murphy says this material system is a particularly energy efficient envelope. Each façade has rows of 50-square-foot windows with perpendicular mullions, which ensures that 97 percent of the hotel and restaurant is daylighted. The longest façades and the most windows face east and west—an inopportune siting plan that causes excess solar heat gain. To compensate for all these direct rays of sunlight, Centrepoint used high-efficiency glass panels and light-colored concrete that wouldn’t absorb heat.

One sustainability feature formally expressed are the hotel’s rooftop solar panels, which form a saw-toothed, canopy-like presence. These photovoltaic panels (there are 100 of them, stretching over 4,000 square feet) were originally going to be covered in a series of screens, but eventually Centrepoint and Quaintance decided to let them become a “signature piece” of the building’s architecture, says Murphy.

Green luxury
Visitors enter the hotel through a painted white cast concrete porte-cochere entrance canopy with flowing white drapes. The hotel’s front registration desk is a 12 foot bronze clad cantilevering beam. The main circulation area of the hotel is a double height social lobby paved in stone with matching symmetrical spiral staircases that lead up to the top level. There is an open loft plan throughout, with exposed ductwork, concrete walls and concrete columns that are glazed into a warmer golden hue. The hotel’s rooms are large—400 square feet at least. Many recycled materials were used, like the walnut used for the bistro bar, restaurant tables, and host desk. Almost half of the hotel’s materials were sourced within 18 miles of the site. A local artist (Chip Holton) created 500 pieces of art for the hotel, and local artisans custom designed the furnishings.

Other relatively common sustainability features at the Proximity Hotel include low-flow fixtures and sensor-controlled ventilation systems. The hotel’s elevator system (the first of its kind in North America) generates power as cars descend, and a geothermal cooling system dips deep into subsurface water in six wells for chilling.

Asking the right questions, finding the right solutions
Perhaps the most unusual aspect of Proximity’s design process was the strong role Quaintance took. He appointed himself the chief design officer and was involved in every aspect of the hotel’s design. “He got it, and he pushed it,” says Murphy about Quaintance’s advocacy for green design.

Centrepoint’s client consistently made them find multiple ways to attack problems and select the best solution. “He would never accept the first answer,” Murphy says. “There were three, four, or five iterations of everything there.”

This kind of Socratic inquiry might be what brought such a high level of sustainability to the project within its tight budget. Murphy says the project is a testament to the fact that developers don’t need to indiscriminately throw money at projects to buy LEED points. “There was never an open check book.”

Indeed, the Proximity’s environmental goals added only a $1.5-2 million premium to its budget. These energy-saving features are projected to save $140,000 per year and with enhanced occupancy profits will likely pay for themselves in four to five years, when the hotel market is littered with sustainable properties rushing to LEED certification on the heels of Proximity.