Pocketbook Hudson, designed by Charlap Hyman and Herrero, opens this fall.

Several years ago Adam Charlap Hyman and Andre Herrero found themselves diving head first into the ancient bathing cultures of Rome, India, and Ethiopia, as well as contemporary Japanese onsens, for their first hotel project, Pocketbook Hudson. "There are a lot of places in the world with rich bathing cultures, and the United States is notably not one of them," Charlap Hyman says with a laugh. Pocketbook aims to change that.

The 66,000-square-foot red brick building in Hudson, New York, started life in the 1880s as a textile factory before being converted to manufacture pocketbooks in the 1930s. After operations ceased, the late interior designer Eleanor Ambos bought the building in 1993 to house part of her antique furniture collection. It wasn't long before Ambos, for whom the hotel's restaurant is named, became friendly with Pocketbook co-founder Sean Roland, who grew up in Hudson. After she died, Roland, along with three partners, purchased the property.

The ELLE Decor A-List firm of Charlap Hyman and Herrero was brought on in October 2021 to oversee the design and architecture of the restaurant, bar and lounge, and guest rooms. "We had this very interesting connection early on around this idea of world-building," Roland says of Charlap Hyman and Herrero. Pocketbook is the firm's first hospitality project of this scale; it took four years to complete. "The biggest egg to crack was how to fit all these different programs into a large facility and create circulation that felt natural," Herrero says.

The designers asked themselves what was considered public space and what private, and how they could subvert those ideas.  WET, Leonard Koren's 1970s magazine on "gourmet bathing," was one source of inspiration. Alongside the 46 guestrooms, which are available to book this month, there are a spa with saltwater thermal pools that will open in January, a tiny dance club, and a "gathering room" with a 200-person capacity. The top floor will be a design showroom dedicated to local artisans and antique dealers.

"It's a gorgeous beast of a building that came with so many stories," says co-founder Nancy Kim, the former design director for hotel group Atelier Ace. A quote from science fiction writer Octavia Butler served as a guiding principle for the founders: "All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change."

A gut renovation to accommodate an entirely new floor plan was the first step. Rather than effacing the original architecture, Charlap Hyman and Herrero regarded the building as a shell to work within. They intentionally kept a series of structural columns intact that dictated the orientation of the public areas as well as the format of the guest rooms. The factory's arched windows allow for sunsets and sunrises to be visible from almost anywhere.  "We listened to the building," Kim says. "It told us what it wanted to be."

The material palette for the guest rooms included maple, steel, chrome, and tempered glass. "We got interested in furniture with multiple functions," Charlap Hyman says. Bathrooms are spliced throughout some of the rooms -- baths joining the headboards of beds, sinks coupling with columns -- transforming common conceptions of domestic space. Transition, transmission, and transference also led the duo's conceptual and aesthetic choices. "It is meant to be a bit in-between," Charlap Hyman says. "That is the essence of what a hotel is: a liminal, transitional space."

Hudson Valley's Newest Hotel Was Designed For "Gourmet Bathing"