Changing Skyline: Proving green can be gorgeous
You can be pretty sure that the smell you smell in most fancy new hotels in America is not the scent of money. 
More likely, it's a gassy brew of glue, formaldehyde, and ethylene, sublimating off the walls, floors, and furniture and into the guest-room air.
Dayna Lee knows that noxious smell all too well. The Hollywood designer has created the interiors for a dozen swank hotels since founding Powerstrip Studio with her husband, Ted Bemer, in 2000. Once, after spending a long day inspecting the rooms in a new project, Lee emerged from the marathon feeling sick and woozy.
"I realized that I was in some kind of toxic shock," she recalls.
Lee should feel significantly better when she finishes the walk-through at Philadelphia's new Hotel Palomar, which will open Oct. 15 at 17th and Sansom Streets, in what used to be called the Architects Building. Designed to meet strict environmental standards, the hotel's only detectable fumes are likely to be the enticing scent of room service, prepared in its natural-foods restaurant, called Square 1682.
While Philadelphia has been steadily compiling an inventory of green offices, schools, and homes, the Palomar will be the city's first hotel to qualify for the U.S. Green Building Council's coveted seal of approval. Palomar expects to receive a silver rating, and possibly gold, the council's second-highest. But getting to that level turned out to be more complicated than slapping organic paint on the walls and recycling the construction debris.As a category, hotels have lagged in embracing green design. As Lee explains, that's partly because the industry is so focused on creating luxe environments, no matter how many volatile organic compounds it takes. Before agreeing to the Philadelphia experiment, Palomar's parent, Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants, wanted assurances that the hotel would not be "a plywood box."
Kimpton needn't have worried. The real accomplishment of the Palomar is that it proves that green design can be as stylish and plush as the less-earth-friendly variety. Indeed, Lee's interiors owe some of their refinement to the extra effort she had to make to compensate for the limited palette of green materials on the market. While the Palomar is the first of a new generation of hotels to open in Philadelphia, in anticipation of the Convention Center expansion, it has already set a high standard.
The $51 million construction project, led by Gensler Architects in New Jersey, was lucky to inherit a thin, elegant tower blessed with windows on three sides. The building was created in 1929 by a team under the command of Paul Philippe Cret, the most important Philadelphia architect of the day. Cret's hand is visible all over the 24-story Art Deco tower - especially in the brass-trimmed French doors, Beaux-Arts pilasters, and marble fireplaces that turn the top floor into the equivalent of a Parisian drawing room.
Now repurposed as an intimate party space, the top floor gleams with sunlight during day and the lights of the city skyline at night. Gensler's architects also did a fine job of restoring the richly tiled second-floor elevator landing, a crazy quilt of Mediterranean, Tudor, and Arts-and-Crafts elements. People visiting the restaurant's second floor will have a hard time choosing between that elevator and the sweeping staircase that Gensler designed.
The remainder of the building, which once served as studio space for architects, had no memorable details, so those interiors were gutted and outfitted with energy-efficient systems.
Very likely, the Kimpton chain could have accumulated enough points to qualify for a green certificate simply by installing such efficient new equipment in the old tower. One of the criticisms of the council's rating system has been that it is driven by the urge to reduce energy costs and get a quick payback with lower energy bills.
Conserving fossil fuels is laudable, to be sure. What's unfortunate is that environmental goals that don't immediately translate into operational savings, like improving indoor air, often get slashed from the design budget.
Kimpton, however, allowed Lee a free hand to outfit the interiors with organic materials, so long as she made green pretty. She quickly discovered that most environmentally friendly fabrics come only in solid colors and that much of the approved furnishings look as if they belong in a college dorm.
As a result, Lee's studio decided to design virtually every piece of furniture, window treatment, wall covering, and decorative pillow in the house. Lee's aesthetic is more idiosyncratic than typically found in the hotel business: She infused traditional elements with a whimsical, pop-art-inflected sensibility that gives the hotel personality.
To pep up the solid fabrics, she resorted to texture. The creamy linen curtains in the lobby were embroidered with a loose stitching. Because she wanted to avoid wallpaper glue, the corridors and rooms were painted instead, and enhanced with thin strips of wood arranged in a vaguely Chinese pattern. She covered some walls in glass tiles, prized for being renewable and recyclable.
Lee, who was responsible for the interiors at the Bridge movie theater in West Philadelphia, also wielded color in arresting ways at the Palomar, especially the banquet room's combination of soft purple, shimmering gold, and cream. Everything has just the right amount of bling. Even the eclectic art collection was sourced locally, mainly from Philadelphia art students.
The hard part was finding manufacturers to carry out her designs using materials that are renewable and don't throw off noxious gases. She insisted on real wool, or fabric with recycled content; wood approved by the Forest Stewardship Council; and formaldehyde-free foams and plastics. Gensler tested dozens of low-water shower heads before finding one by Speakman that produced the reasonably strong pressure guests are used to. Kimpton intends to use only organic cleaning products, according to a company executive.
As Lee discovered, no environmental decision is without consequences. So while Chinese manufacturers were able to produce high-quality, eco-friendly furniture at lower prices than their American counterparts, the foreign products had to be heavily packaged and shipped long distances. Lee says she sometimes opts for locally produced furniture, even if the organic standards were less stringent.
"At one point, I was only going to buy furniture from the Amish," Lee recalls. "Then I learned they don't have phones and don't do e-mail, which makes revisions hard. We had one of our guys drive out and knock on their door."
The effort should be worth it. Walking around the just-finished Palomar, you notice one thing right away.
Nothing smells.
