Williamsburg is filled with hip restaurants, hip boutiques, hip bars, and hipsters. But if you don’t live there, there aren’t really any hotel options in the increasingly popular and overpriced Brooklyn neighbourhood. Tourists don’t want stay in Manhattan and cross the East River for their artisanal cheese needs. Williamsburg has a hotel problem, and YOTEL wants to solve it.
In 2017, YOTEL will open a 14-storey building encased in glass and topped with with cascading terraces. It will be filled with teeny tiny “cabins” that could also be described as micro-rooms. Each one will have a bed that converts to a couch as well as monsoon-rain showers and wall-mounted TVs, the local architecture.
It all sounds kind of futuristic, huh? That’s because YOTEL’s a pretty futuristic company. You’ve probably heard these Japan-inspired microtels before. The YO! Company subsidiary started building hotels with capsule-sized rooms inspired by the luxury accommodations on British Airways flights. In fact, the first YOTELs were at airports in London and Berlin. YO! opened its first US-based YOTEL in Midtown back in 2011. The New York City expansion must be working, because now YO! is investing who knows how much money in this splashy Williamsburg tower. And the neighbourhood’s future is appropriately futuristic, as well.
There’s no word yet on how expensive the rooms cabins will be. In Manhattan, they start at $US129 a night. But hey, in Williamsburg, the cabins could be even more expensive with the direction the neighbourhood’s headed! [DNA Info]