July 14, 2017 By Elizabeth Fazzare Architectural Digest
“When I was a kid, I wanted to be like Eloise and live in a hotel,” recalls interior designer Ken Fulk. Henry Hall, his latest New York City project, is making that dream come true. The 225-unit apartment building on the northern border of Hudson Yards in midtown Manhattan, is more like a boutique hotel than a residence, and the Fulk-designed interiors and model units are far more posh and playful than a standard beige rental. Public amenities like a double-height lobby whose design is “a dose of midcentury meets the ’70s,” per Fulk; a bar run by the restaurateurs behind New York’s Charlie Bird and Pasquale Jones; a drawing room; and a wine lounge encourage visitors and residents to mingle in common spaces. Private amenities like a residents’ club, rooftop lounge, and back garden make it feel like a destination. AD sat down with self-proclaimed “hotel junkie” Fulk to get the full scoop.
Architectural Digest: Why did this hotel-cum-residential project spark your interest?
Ken Fulk: There are a few old places in New York you can kind of live in, like the Carlyle, but it really hasn’t happened to residential living where you might move into a new residential building and have a hotel-like experience. That part was really exciting to me. It was a bit of a long-held fantasy of mine. And so, to think about all of the things we’ve learned—I’m a bit of a hotel junkie anyway and love to try new ones, see new ones—and then to apply it to what we do on a daily basis, which is to create environments for people to live their lives and to have these experiences in, it was really a rare opportunity. And on top of that, we really got to conceive the whole thing. We are the creative directors, so we’ve done everything from naming the building and branding and graphics to the design and the amenities.
AD: How does the name Henry Hall represent the spirit of the building?
KF: We wanted it not to feel like another New York apartment building with the number in front of it and the street address, which seems to be de rigueur, or some weird name like “Infinity” that just sounds like it could be anywhere or it could be a private equity firm. Then we wanted it, even though it’s a new building, to sort of feel as if maybe it had been there for a while. You’re not sure. And we wanted to have a personality like it potentially could sound like a real person, though I like the idea of a hall, which has an academic connotation, or a gathering spot where you would have come to a hall to meet and engage. We wanted it to somehow felt personal but also communal.
AD: What kind of inspirations and era were you looking to evoke in this building?
KF: Well, I sort of imagined that it might have transpired over time. The building has some beautiful kind of old materials: It has steel windows and this wonderful kind of clinker brick façade, so the brick has lots of texture to it. So inside I wanted it to feel as if maybe it had had a little dose of midcentury meets the ’70s. That may have been in my head. Perhaps the building had been an old building that got a facelift in the ’60s or ’70s so that it was not shiny, bright, new, modern but it had some modernity to it.
AD: How did you design Henry Hall’s communal spaces around the concept of a hotel’s communal spaces?
KF: Over the past couple of decades, hotels have really sort of become our new living rooms. I think in places like New York where you live pretty densely and everyone isn’t always having folks over to their homes because not everyone has big apartments or even when they do there’s such a wide array of things to go out and do, over the past several years we’ve sort of begun to use hotel lobbies as personal spaces. I meet people there. I hang out. We’ll have cocktails. It’s interesting for those folks staying in the hotel. We wanted it to have that vibe, sort of be an extension for the people living and also sort of a draw for people who just want to be around that energy and to have a mix of public and private. I think that is kind of the secret sauce, a bit of a tension between those two worlds from the people who call it home, the people who are just there for the night, the people that are passing through, and the people that may just want to have a peek.
AD: How did you create this building’s eclectic vibe?
KF: I mean, that’s one of the interesting things about this place: there’s very little that has been ordered; it’s either custom or found. I think that that gives it a particular vibe. So often you come into hospitality spaces of buildings and most of it is contract furniture that has been designed to go in “heavy-use spaces,” and we really didn’t do any of that. Certainly, we want things to last and we’ll take care of it but we picked individual pieces really based on liking them and feeling like they exemplified the character of the building.
AD: Of all the decorative pieces chosen, found, or made, do you have a favorite?
KF: I have a few small things that I happen to love that were hard to let go of. I am super intrigued by the big, giant chandelier because it was such a find. There was a field at Brimfield [Antique Flea Markets] and a dealer that I know who is always running to Europe had these super globes. And I’m like, these are so cool; I should make something out of them. And he said, actually, I have 32 of them. That’s sort of how that sprang but it’s not uncommon as to how the project came to be. While we designed every inch of it, there was enough room there for it to ebb and flow. And it happened so that there’s enough quirkiness, enough imperfections, enough collected so that it feels personal and interesting. I like to say that if everyone loves everything, it’s probably not very good. We built some of that into it.