Courtesy of Atelier Ace.
Last year, rumors floated that an Ace Hotel was opening in a former Salvation Army shelter on the Bowery. Now the team behind the hipster hotel chain, Atelier Ace, has announced that it’ll instead be launching a new brand, Sister City, in the fall of this year.
The hotel, at 225 Bowery, will offer “200 intimate, efficient rooms, a ground-floor restaurant and a rooftop bar,” according to today’s announcement. Rooms will range in size from 126 to 262 square feet and rates will start at $259, a spokesperson told us.
The hotel’s minimalist aesthetic is inspired by “the functional perfection of Finnish saunas, Japanese bento boxes, rock-cut cliff dwellings of prehistory and John Cage’s 4’33,” per the announcement.
The John Cage song in question is, of course, four minutes and 33 seconds of silence, which is pretty hard to achieve on the Bowery these days. No matter: the hotel can be entered via a garden at the end of Freeman Alley, the narrow nook where Freemans is located.
For the restaurant and rooftop bar, Atelier Ace plans to team with Nicholas Morgenstern of boutique ice cream parlor Morgenstern’s and popular Lower East Side eatery El Rey, a spokesperson said. A sample menu submitted to Community Board 3 last month lists a variety of Italian and American dishes, and a floor plan indicates the restaurant will have 38 indoor tables and 26 outdoor tables, while the rooftop bar will have 11 indoor tables and 18 outdoor tables. A spokesperson said she was unable to confirm the restaurant’s name or cuisine type, as it’s still under development.
The building housing the Salvation Army Chinatown Shelter, formerly an SRO, was sold for $30 million in 2014. According to HAKS, the architect overseeing the 10-story building’s renovation as well as a three-story rooftop addition, the “micro hotel” will also be accessible via a “courtyard oasis” (presumably similar to the nearby Public hotel’s) on the Bowery.