The Beatrice Hotel Embraces Downtown – Architecture Critic Morgan
Saturday, November 13, 2021
The Beatrice Hotel is a jewel. The boutique hotel that opened in downtown Providence on September 1st is the kind of hostelry that our historic city deserves, but rarely gets. Realized in a restored 19th-century bank, the Beatrice is in triumphant contrast to the recent uninspiring new chain hotels, such as the Residence Inn, Aloft, and Homewood Suites. Developer and former mayor Joseph Paolino, Jr. rescued and revitalized the Exchange Bank, a handsome, five-story commercial block. This hotel shows how we can create desirable business spaces that enrich the cultural landscape of the city.
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The Beatrice offers so many lessons for downtown development. Recycling an existing building is better for the environment, not to mention that a visually interesting historic landmark does more for our souls than a flat wall with uniform windows punched in it. Quality materials will pay back more dividends than cheap construction. Sophisticated and smart is always better than dumb and greedy. And, perhaps most important, the new hotel demonstrates that a lot of good small projects have more hope or revitalizing a city than one ill-conceived grandiose folly like the Fane Tower.
Like its historic neighbors, the Merchant's Bank, the old Custom House, and the Providence Arcade, the one-time Empire Bank is a living link to Providence’s commercial heritage. Planners ignored this when they plopped down giant boxes like its 100 Westminster Street neighbor (the former Fleet Center)–twenty stories of reflective glass and slick granite cladding. That 1985 skyscraper was the work of HOK Group, America’s largest architecture and engineering firm. While HOK has done airports, stadiums, museums, and corporate headquarters around the world, it is doubtful that they gave any thought whatsoever to the Providence context before dumping their scale-busting behemoth here.
Having HOK’s building next door, however, meant that the Exchange Bank had been thoroughly analyzed and stabilized, so there were no major structural problems to hamper the insertion of the hotel in the 1888 bank. Project designer, Eric Zuena, of ZDS Architecture & Interior Design said this rehab was pretty straightforward. But Zuena ingeniously created the building’s signature feature of a three-story atrium, contrasting the brick hotel and glazed wall of the Fleet Center. What was once an alley between the two buildings is now a suave canyon linking Kennedy Plaza to Westminster Street. The entryway is both hip and traditional, something different from the ubiquitous and formulaic hotel lobbies foisted upon us by corporate culture.
The highlight of the lobby is a mosaic that honors the hotels’s namesake, Beatrice DePasquale Temkin, who was Paolino’s mother. A plaque that highlights her life includes some phrases that could apply to this project as well. “She set high standards for herself and others. She arrived early, dressed to the nines, and captivated everyone with her playful wit and glamour.” Like “Queen Bea,” the hotel strives for “an exceptional experience infused with style and substance.”
Zuena’s firm also did the tasteful interior design. Bellini, the Beatrice’s restaurant and one of Ignazio Cipriani’s international chain, complements the hotel’s quietly elegant palette The best feature of the bedrooms are the views: intimate details of the Turk’s Head building, glimpses of the river, and a prospect of houses climbing College Hill. Instead of the standard landscapes on the walls, the windows provide the guests with living pictures of Providence.
Although slightly more costly than the other luxury downtown hotels, the Beatrice has adopted the mantra of “tastes expensive and it is.” A planned private roof-top garden also offers an appropriate whiff of exclusivity that may make this hotel even more desirable (its 47 rooms have been booked every weekend since it opened). But it is the location–and the fact that it is only five stories tall, the ideal height for a livable city.
Perhaps there is no point in dwelling on the number of historic older buildings nearby that were razed for less attractive and insensitive replacements such as the Fleet Center, Textron, and the Hospital Trust Tower. But visualize what the plaza between the Turk’s Head and RISD Library would be like if the Exchange Bank were not here. Its approachable size helps to mitigate the out-of-scale clunkers that surround it. Despite the later intruders, this small plaza is one of the pleasantest urban spaces in America. And The Beatrice holds it all together.
Architecture critic Morgan has a graduate degree in restoration and preservation of historic architecture from Columbia University.
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