[Photos: courtesy Ace Hotel Group]
Atelier Ace, the creative team behind the Ace Hotel Group, has announced plans for its newest project: Sister City, a minimalist micro-hotel concept billed as “an experiment in essentialism,” slated to open this fall in New York City.
Finnish saunas, Japanese bento boxes, prehistoric rock-cut cliff dwellings, and John Cage’s 4’33”–the avant-garde composer’s famous score of silence–are all listed as lofty sources of inspo in the press release, and the hotel’s freshly launched Instagram account (@sistercitynyc) includes only a trio of very subtle gray-to-white gradients that nearly look completely blank.
It all nods to a pared-down, zen-like retreat, which isn’t what we’ve come to expect from the formula of popular Ace Hotel properties: highly crafted, reclaimed urban structures that offer a curated slice of city life for creatives and trendy see-and-be-seen clientele. Instead, Sister City reads as a very different prototype, made to attract the visitor who not only minds forgoing the clubby boutique-hotel experience and all of its little extras but might even prefer to.