A global pandemic doesn’t create ideal conditions for the hotel industry. With leisure travel way down and the need for overnight stays limited, businesses such as the Wythe Hotel, a 70-room boutique hotel in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, found little use for their services.
Little paying use, anyway. During the height of the pandemic’s pressure on New York City hospitals, the hotel had donated its rooms to local doctors and nurses who were quarantining after shifts in highly contagious environments. But once that pressure decreased, the hotel was once again without much demand.
Owner Peter Lawrence and his team began to think about how they could serve the New York market. Even though locals didn’t need hotel rooms, perhaps they’d be interested in using one as a private office.
Whether people want a private space to get some work done or just to get away from their loved ones, the dropoff in overnight guests at hotels may mean a turn to alternative daytime use.
“There’s a lot of demand right now in mixed-use neighborhoods that skew residential, where lots of people live and it would be an absolute dream to get to walk to work a few days a week instead of getting on the subway and commuting,” Hodari says.
Lawrence says the hotel-turned-office isn’t just about creating an alternative space for those working from home, but providing some hospitality—and the swanky amenities of a boutique hotel. “At 6 o’clock when their day is done, they can come sit in our beautiful garden and get a cocktail and some oysters or whatever they feel like to finish their day,” he says.
Hotels could be a new area for growth, he says, and hotels may start thinking about making dedicated private office rooms a more standard offering. For a business traveler, Hodari says, a separate office down the hall is likely a more attractive amenity than a swimming pool or a rooftop deck. “That would be the one perk to rule them all in a hotel,” he says. The conversion of the Wythe Hotel is a hint at what could come. “I think this is something that was long overdue, and this is a first step towards real-world examples of workplace providers and hotel providers becoming a bit more intertwined,” Hodari says.
For now, the Wythe Hotel is making its office transition a temporary experiment. To start, its converted spaces are available from now through the end of August.
“We have one room that has all the beds carefully stacked up and tagged and ready to go back at another point,” Lawrence says. “We’re still waiting to see, is this 80 phone calls every day or is this 12 phone calls every day.”