New York's W Hotel Transforms Lobby to Pay Tribute to Times Square

In all markets, millennials are causing businesses to reinvent themselves. Hotels are meeting the high expectations of millennials by using technology to transform their lobbies into a destination where guests and locals can interact and take guest experiences to the next level. The bar has now become a part of the front desk.

New York’s W Hotel decided to transform its hotel lobby by styling it as a tribute to Times Square, offering a lively atmosphere that could shift from daytime to parties with a custom DJ booth and features of the legendary NYC landmark.

Putting Times Square Indoors

The iconic sights and sounds of Times Square originate from the lights, graffiti, interactive displays, and energy from tourists, street performers, and busy New Yorkers.

“The design of the living room at the W Hotel was leveraged from a design narrative that drew inspiration from its Time Square location,” said Fergal Hayes, project director for Capital Expenditures with Starwood Hotels, who contributed to overseeing the vision and completion of the W Hotel’s new lobby space. With Times Square as the motif for the W Hotel’s new lobby, a group of design teams working in cooperation with integration firm, Mode:Green, were tasked with capturing the New York landmark’s atmosphere and recreating it indoors.

Adding to the modern décor, neon lighting, vibrant signs, and graffiti were custom-designed for the space and were given digital life by Mode:Green. For instance, a digital countdown clock takes up a wall reaching about seven feet tall, and the lobby-lounge teems with vibrant sound from 32 independent zones and hidden, custom speakers. But it’s not just the bright lights that make the lounge so lively – the lounge has its own digital brain, capable of shifting its atmosphere for different guests and events.

Reinventing an Iconic Scene

All the Times Square advertisements, interactive billboards, and skyscrapers come from many different companies and the individual pieces weren’t designed to work together initially. In the same way, aesthetically, W Hotel’s team of designers were challenged to create a cohesive, yet diverse space as a tribute to the Big Apple’s famous landscape. For Mode:Green, this meant taking the technology from dozens of different manufacturers and making them all communicate with one another as a singular system.

Mode:Green was the technology expert for the project, collaborating with the design team to connect  all of the dozens of LED lights and custom speakers throughout the lobby and inside the private booths with one another, as well as with the wall-sized countdown clock.

Doing so involved careful planning. The wiring and speakers are all hidden among the décor, where an invisible automation system makes everything simple to control. Using a touchscreen, the staff can activate and adjust every light and speaker to create the right atmosphere from a selection of presets, including Happy Hour, Morning, and Fire Alarm, which shuts off the music and brightens the lights for a safe exit. Guests in the private booths also have control over their own audio zone, so they can pump the music from the custom New-Year’s-Eve-Ball inspired DJ booth or turn it down for a quiet conversation.

Mode:Green specializes in this type of complex audio and lighting systems, geared towards a hotel environment that accepts rotating guests.

“To bring the highly customized Times Square-themed lighting into the hotel lobby and DJ area, Mode:Green was hands-on from the beginning with the design team,” said Hayes. “The W Hotel is a completely custom space and Mode:Green was instrumental in helping to deliver the brand.”

Hotels face a new challenge to create lobbies that are immersive, social environments. It’s a design and, now, a technological challenge, but the result can differentiate a brand and nurture a crop of new, young guests who will become loyal patrons