Advertisement

arts entertainmentArchitecture

Two new Dallas hotels take a ‘kitchen sink’ approach to art, but is it too much?

For the Virgin and Hall Arts hotels, good art is good business.

A few weeks ago I was sitting with the artist Linnea Glatt in the Commons Club, the restaurant in the new Virgin Hotel in the Design District, when a gallerist who is a mutual friend stopped by our table and offered her opinion on the design of the place. “You know that saying that you should always take off one thing before you go out?”

She had a point. The restaurant is, quite intentionally, a lot: an overstuffed tropical modern environment. The mantra of Morris Lapidus, the architect of Miami kitsch palaces like the Fontainebleau and the Eden Roc, was “too much is never enough,” but even he might have blanched at the Virgin interiors. “It’s like they’re throwing everything in the kitchen sink in here,” says Glatt.

But this is why I invited her to lunch: to talk about what the idea of an “art hotel” might mean to an actual artist who lives and works in Dallas. Glatt has been that for three decades, a local artist who is known for both large-scale public projects and painstakingly crafted works of great delicacy.

Advertisement

The subject came to mind as “art” has become a key branding component of new Dallas hotels. It is a trend that began with downtown’s Joule — fronted by Tony Tasset’s godawful eyeball sculpture — and continued with the more down-market Lorenzo Hotel in the Cedars. In recent weeks, they have been joined by a new pair, the Virgin Hotel in the Design District and the Hall Arts Hotel in the Arts District.

News Roundups

Catch up on the day's news you need to know.

Or with:

“I believe very strongly in art being in a public forum,” says Glatt, who has a piece in the collection of the Adolphus Hotel, but is generally skeptical of such commissions, which tend to be purely decorative. “When you read requests for proposals, it’s like it’s already determined what the artist should talk about.”

Advertisement

When too much is too much

The two new entrants reflect the wildly disparate personalities of their respective patriarchs. The Virgin is a union between Dunhill Partnership and Virgin, but it is every inch the progeny of Virgin chief Richard Branson, the jet-setting British libertine, right down to the Commons Club’s mirror-wrapped “shag lounge.”

That space, and the other public areas on the ground floor, are the work of interior designer Joel Mozersky (other interiors, including guest rooms, are by Swoon), who favors a cartoonish, fantasy aesthetic, with a riot of materials and colors. There are paintings in splashy hues and arched door frames that look like cave openings. If Wilma Flintstone were having an affair with Austin Powers, they’d meet up at the Virgin Hotel.

Advertisement

By way of contrast, the Hall Arts is the namesake of Craig Hall, the Dallas developer seen most recently hosting Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg at his now internet-famous California “wine cave.” One could say that the Hall Arts is the Pete Buttigieg of boutique hotels: clean-cut in its progressive modernity, but at pains not to offend. There is no shagging going on here, at least not in the restaurant, a transparent space named for Hall’s mother, Ellie.

Architecturally, the Virgin is defined by the diamond grid metal screen that wraps its street-facing facades, camouflaging a four-story pedestal that holds the lobby and restaurant on the ground level, and three floors of parking above. Guest rooms, 268 of them, are in a tower that rises over this pedestal, as does a linked single-story gray brick block that encloses event spaces.

Looking out from the interior, the diamond screen frames views and provides shade. “We wanted to make sure you almost always see it,” says Lauren Cadieux, project architect for Dallas’ 5G Studio Collaborative.

A problem: You don’t almost always see it from the outside. Although the grid animates its primary facades facing Turtle Creek Boulevard and Hi Line Drive, its still-quite visible other exterior faces are covered in the cheap composite cladding known as EIFS (pronounced ee-fis). A not particularly interesting wall mural by Los Angeles’ Drew Merritt (the kind of “street” style commercial art for sale in middling coffee shops) doesn’t do much to disguise the cheap surface while reinforcing the art-as-decorative-theme ethos.

It would have been nice to carry the screen fully around the building, or at least find a more attractive paneling alternative. According to Cadieux, these options were cost-prohibitive. But things could have been worse: The architects managed to convince the city to reduce the parking requirements on the site, so the garage would not have to be so imposing — just another example of Dallas’ own auto-centric planning acting against its own best interests.

Architects shouldn’t have to fight the city for decent urban planning; the result here is a more friendly environment for visitors to the city generally and the Design District in particular.

Encounters with art

The Hall Arts project handles some of the same challenges with considerably more elegance. The facades here are the nicest in the Arts District: crisp grids of reflective light-blue glass. But in those sections without windows, the architects at HKS did not simply slap up the cheapest possible alternative, but developed a separate panel system of aluminum tubes that is less expensive than glass but gives a distinctive animation to the wall plane.

Advertisement

The hotel was a literal afterthought, the rear end of a composition fronted by a 28-story, 45-unit condo tower that looks out on Flora Street, set back and above a retail pedestal, as the Arts District’s zoning demands. The hotel itself is a 10-story, 183-room box set behind the residential tower, to which it is linked by a shared event space. Originally, there was no plan for the hotel, but Eddie Abeyta, the principal for HKS, convinced Hall to “add some dimension," to the variety of buildings in the Arts District.

Like the Virgin, the Hall Arts was also shaped, for the worse, by Dallas’ parking legacy. When Hall purchased the site, it was already freighted with a — mostly — underground garage. The upshot is that the building sits on an odd bump, with public spaces divided between two levels.

Abeyta has navigated this with some acuity, but there is no escaping its awkwardness, especially along Hall’s “Texas Art Walk,” a path that leads from Ross to Flora between the hotel and the adjacent KPMG Plaza tower, also developed by Hall. To make this block-long trip, one must mount steps at either end to climb over the garage, which pushes up into the public realm. It is not ideal, especially for those with mobility issues.

Advertisement

The good news is that the artworks that bring life to that trip are something more than mere decoration, which is true as well for the program within the hotel. The restaurant, for instance, is graced by an exceptional landscape painting, in rich colors, by Kristin Baker. Giving animation to the lobby is a hanging composition of hundreds of translucent purple tambourines by Lava Thomas. And the elevator bank becomes a miniature gallery for a dizzying nose-shaped sculpture by Najla El Zein that is made of 6,302 plastic spoons.

Dallasites have been trained by shopping at NorthPark Center to appreciate art in a commercial environment. The Virgin falls short of that standard, using it as a means of mood enforcement, but at Hall Arts the effect is something more serious.

During our lunch, Glatt noted that the experience of art in public “should be like a wonder, an encounter.”

At its best, the Hall Arts achieves that. For a hotel in the Arts District, that’s a pretty picture.

Advertisement

See what else we’re building! Find more architecture stories here.

Details

Hall Arts Hotel, 1717 Leonard St., hallartshotel.com

Virgin Hotel, 1445 Turtle Creek Blvd., virginhotels.com/dallas