Five Questions With: John Grosvenor

John Grosvenor, a founding principal at Northeast Collaborative Architects, has taken a lead management role in designing spaces for boutique hotels. Seven of the projects he shepherded recently were named among the top 10 in Rhode Island by Worldwide Travel Guide.

PBN: Explain what a boutique hotel means. Does it imply small in scale?
GROSVENOR:
In my mind, boutique means it’s really designed for the context of where it is. The antithesis might be a chain hotel. The boutique hotel is really [particular] to the property. Boutique is I would say unique and it tends to be small, but they are not that small. It’s definitely not a 300-room hotel.

PBN: How did you apply the boutique concept to the Cliffside Inn in Newport, which was once a private home, then a school?
GROSVENOR:
It has a residential feeling to it. The rooms embrace that concept of being an inn but it also takes on that particular period, in this case, a high Victorian-style, 1890s villa. Furnishings are representative of that feeling also. It has the feeling of being in someone’s very large house. Where it’s different is it has a keen eye to privacy. We had to redo the facility to make sure we had the rooms all en-suite.

PBN: What do guests expect to find in a boutique property? Do people seek them out?
GROSVENOR:
They do. They want to feel the local texture and have innkeepers who are going to be hosts. They really want a hosted stay. They like the scale of it being more intimate. And a lot of time, what they really like is the specialized treatment. They don’t feel like a number, they feel like a guest of this house. These are not cookie cutter rooms. They can come back 12 times and have 12 different experiences.

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PBN: In a project like the National Hotel on Block Island, which was well-known and open for years, how do you create a new experience?
GROSVENOR:
In that case, when we first got to the property [in 1983], there was no retail down below [the porch]. The hotel had large bathrooms on the main floors. We had to put all the rooms en-suite, with their bathrooms. We put back the tower, the belvedere that stands as the icon of the building. We dug out [the foundation] and put in all those retail stores. It was the most prominent of hotels, but when we started on it, it was at the end of its life expectancy. Hotels had gone out of fashion. At one time Block Island had 10 or 12 of these, the [seasonal] New England resort hotels. [This was] one of the first historic tax credit projects for a hotel.

PBN: Do you have a favorite project?
GROSVENOR:
We did [Pelham Court Hotel in Newport]. It was actually a car-repair facility. That was with another building, just uphill, that was a storage barn. That storage facility is offices. About six years ago, our office building, there originally, converted it into this Pelham Court Hotel. It is a condo hotel. It was built to be sold, and managed, so you can rent it out when you’re not there. In Boston and New York they’ve had that concept for a while, but we were the first in Newport. I own, with my partners, a total of 12 rooms. Each of the rooms is big. They are appointed like condominiums, with fireplaces. They are all different. That’s the boutique aspect of it. There’s a little mews, like a courtyard, we built over what used to be a parking lot. It’s an in-town boutique hotel. You wouldn’t know you were staying at a condominium.

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