Our firm was asked to redesign the Pierre Hotel’s ballroom, stripping away the accumulated results of prior renovations and refashioning the room as a dramatic and architecturally unified space, returning it to its original, smaller volume. While this created a functional challenge, there was an opportunity to create a beautifully detailed and proportioned room on the footprint of the original.
We pursued an 18th-century French neoclassical design, referring to the powerful architectural ideas and features of the hotel’s French neoclassical 1930s exterior by Schultze & Weaver and honoring the great New York beaux-arts buildings of the period. The Ionic order was selected as a language appropriate to the building, expressing the hotel’s vision of recognizing the neoclassical grandeur of the exterior.