The new Moxy Columbus Short North hotel in Columbus, Ohio, is located in the city's Short North neighborhood—a vibrant enclave of arts, dining, and boutiques just north of the city's downtown. This new branch of Marriott's Millennial-focused chain occupies a new building—designed by local firm Moody Nolan, and built by Dublin, Ohio-based developer Crawford Hoying—that combines hotel, office, and retail spaces. Its daylit interiors—designed by New York–based Celano Design Studio, with Moody Nolan as architect of record—advance trends in both hospitality design and in future-proofing construction.
The 10-story structure sits on the border of Italian Village, a low-rise neighborhood with a planning board that hasn't always been amenable to high-rise construction. "We knew that we were going to be up against it, building a tall building in this area. We weren't the first, but the trend was starting to get a lot of push-back," says Brian Sell, an associate principal at Moody Nolan who led the design of the project. "We asked for a lot of extra working sessions [with the authorities who reviewed the projects]. We'd pick the brains of the architects and designers on the commission. It made the process so much more transparent to everyone, and they felt like they had some ownership."
To modulate the scale of the building, the architects broke down the massing, and designed the floor-to-ceiling windows on the upper floors of the tallest part of the structure—the 10-story hotel tower—to be continuous over two stories, creating an optical illusion that there are fewer floors than there are. Lower down the tower, those glazed openings span only a single floor to echo those in the light brick-clad office volume; a darker brick façade encloses the retail and hotel lobby on the first two floors.
Each use—hotel, office, and retail (in the form of a ground-floor restaurant)—has its own entrance at the base of the building. With space on the ground floor at a premium, the hotel lobby was moved to the second floor to accommodate its sprawling footprint. Tall ceilings lined with exposed mechanical systems give an industrial loftlike feel to the hotel's public spaces. "We're not trying to make something feel old, but we also want some of that truth in materiality—the concrete floors," says Stephanie Niebler, a partner and creative director at Celano Design Studio. "Bringing forward these elements works really nicely with the architecture, but also works really nicely with the interiors, for the Moxy brand, and for what we were doing at this location."
The Celano team developed the design prototype for the Moxy brand in the U.S., so the Columbus location was not its first. The base design approach echoes principles of cohousing: small, carefully designed, and efficient guest rooms, with a focus on public spaces that can accommodate "working and playing in the same space, and the transition from day to night," Niebler says. "It's been really well received by guests."
Part of that strategy has involved rethinking the guest experience in public spaces. For example, guests don't check in at a reception desk, they walk right up to the bar, where they can check in, speak with the concierge, or get a cocktail. The sprawling public area is outfitted with small seating areas that allow guests to find a spot at a table in the hubbub of the bar, a cluster of lounge chairs to have a more relaxed conversation, or a quiet sofa in a removed corner that allows more directed focus on a project at hand.
Moxy also tries to create connections between each location and its surrounding neighborhood—which visitors are encouraged to explore at every turn. The tie-in here is to the area's flourishing fashion industry. "It was fun trying to bring something from Columbus forward that maybe at first sight, people don't necessarily know about, with the whole history of fashion and fashion manufacturing—all of these kids that go to Columbus College of Art and Design and are coming out and starting boutiques and their own brands," Niebler says. "It was fun to lock into that a bit and push the materiality, textures, and details—you know, buttons and zippers [on the lobby furnishings]—but with an edited vision."
The fashion theme extends to the textile installations in the public spaces, all of which were created by Ohio textile artists.
All of these details—from the industrial finishes to the top-stitching on the sofas—is bathed in natural light from floor-to-ceiling windows. "We really wanted large windows on that second floor to cue from the ground that that's an important space," says Teri Umbarger, AIA, an associate principal at Moody Nolan. "I think Celano took cues from the building's shell, and their idea about fashion, and texture, and fabric—stitching different materials together—was a really good correlation between the interior and the exterior."
The Moxy Columbus Short North opened in 2019—not long before capacity had to be limited and some operations suspended because of the COVID-19 pandemic. In many ways, the spread-out lobby works well for social distancing, but what's become clear as the team from Moody Nolan thinks about hospitality design moving forward is that outdoor gathering spaces are going to be more crucial than ever. The Moxy has two—one for the hotel and one for the office—but Umbarger thinks that we'll see even more in hospitality settings in the future. "Some of the things that I have heard and seen is a focus on more open areas—balconies and things—where people can get outside and still have some distance from other people," she says. "I think that's going to continue."
Though it has been able to, and will continue to adapt, to the pandemic, the building and its interiors were designed with an eye toward future-proofing for another adaption: typology. Rather than design a bespoke structure that could only serve as a hotel, Moody Nolan worked with the developer to build-in extra floor-to-floor height, and to make the windows the same height on the office and hotel volumes. "It wasn't the most cost-effective move, but there was the idea of flexibility," Sell says. "What if this hotel doesn't do well? Can those floors be converted to condos or into offices? And what of the office space—what if we need more hotel rooms? That actually could happen in this building."
With all of its built-in flexibility, the Moxy Columbus Short Pump will no doubt continue to evolve, but its innovative design approach is already resonating with more than the Millennial audience it was designed for. "What we've found with the evolution of the brand—we're working on our fourth Moxy now—is that they're getting a lot of a range of different travelers," Niebler says. "Older travelers, younger travelers, people who just want to experience something different and have a tie-in to the locale and the community. I think that's so important right now, too."
