Room Number: Hotel Marcel is United States’ First Net-Zero Hotel
Situated in the heart of New Haven, Connecticut, is a net-zero hotel that hopes to inspire a generation. Hotel Marcel
Ivy Griffith
Situated in the heart of New Haven, Connecticut, is a net-zero hotel that hopes to inspire a generation. Hotel Marcel in New Haven is a sustainable model for a hotel that shows the United States that it’s possible to be luxury and still be responsible to the environment. At Hotel Marcel, guests will feel cocooned comfortably within history while enjoying the perks of modern life and the hotel model that cares deeply about the planet. Step inside Hotel Marcel as CELEB takes us on a tour of the United States’ first net-zero and Passive House certified hotel.
Historic Suites
If ’60’s and ’70’s mod decor is your thing, Hotel Marcel is right up your alley. In a renovated office space, the hotel is a quirky nod to the building’s past while being comfortably modernized for your convenience. The most luxurious accommodations in the hotel are the nine Historic Hospitality Suites. Each suite is individually designed to be whimsical, relaxing, and artistic.
The carpets are playfully geometric, the furniture is ’60’s and ’70’s mod, with colors like pale teal and pale red to elevate your stay to something funky and fun. The rooms, being former office spaces, have been cleverly divided with light opaque wall paneling, to give the spaces a delineated but open feel. Flowing shapes and quirky decor make the suites feel like a blast from the past.
However, it’s not the past you’ll find with touch pads in the rooms that control room temperature, lighting and automatic shades, and triple-glazed windows to keep the weather outside.
Hotel Marcel
If you’re looking to stay in New Haven, chances are good you have an appreciation for the historic value of the area. New England is steeped in rich history, both distant past and modern. It’s the more modern historic that Hotel Marcel embodies, with an exterior that’s boldly reminiscent of the blocky lines of the Brutalist movement. Designed by architect Marcel Breuer, the building that houses the aptly named Hotel Marcel was once an office space and the unbroken rooms offered a chance to create spacious suites and accommodations.
Hotel Marcel offers 165 rooms and suites, each designed to be sustainable and eco-conscious. The revamping of an old building allowed hotel planners to minimize waste as they renovated the space, and build sustainability in from the ground up. Hotel Marcel offers 12 Tesla superchargers and additional level-two EV chargers under their solar canopies.
In a statement, the Hotel Marcel Team explains, “The hotel will be all-electric, generating 100% of its own electricity and energy for heat and hot water with a rooftop solar array and solar parking canopies. The hotel will also include many cutting-edge technologies to modernize the building, including Power over Ethernet (PoE) lighting system, renewable on-site energy generation, plus extensive upgrades to enhance interior temperature control and air quality. The building’s Energy Use Intensity (EUI) rating is projected to be 34 kBtu per square foot — 80% less energy than median EUI for hotels in the United States.”
Unique and Responsible
With a breathtaking view over New Haven and its proximity to Yale University, Hotel Marcel is a luxurious destination you can feel good about booking. On the top floor of the hotel, guests can wander through a James Turrell-esque experience. An event space with an interior courtyard, the ninth floor shows the hotel’s exposed truss system, imprinted in reverse on the hotel’s exterior.
The hotel’s public spaces include the dining destination of BLDG, which turns raw ingredients into masterpieces, a sunken lounge, and 7,000 square feet of event space. The rooms embrace a minimalist vibe while being true to the hotel’s mod past, with the non-suite rooms boasting rich palettes of dark walnut, whites, and carefully handpicked art.
Marcel’s art has been thoughtfully chosen, and the team shares, “Fine artist Kraemer Sims Becker, who is spearheading the guest room artwork selection as well as a private art collection for the hotel, puts an emphasis on female artists, all of whom connect with the Bauhaus movement in their work, inspired by the likes of Anni Albers, Gunta Stölzl, and Benita Koch-Otte. Emphasizing the intersection of Brutalist and Bauhaus, the artwork within the guest rooms varies between room configurations but utilizes the same visual language. Within the King rooms, patchwork pieced wall hangings by Brooklyn-based artist Cory Siegler are suspended from wood frames and are handmade of a combination of fabrics, some of which are archived memo samples from Dutch East Design’s collection of fabric palettes for the project. Double Queen rooms will have a set of two silkscreen print editions, each featuring five vignettes, celebrating the geometry and form in muted greens and sienna. Larger rooms and suites also include reproductions of three different monoprints from Becker’s portfolio.”
Whether you’re there for the architecture, the art, the sustainability or the comfort, Hotel Marcel has it all. The Hotel opens April 2022 and could pave the way forward for other hotels to embrace sustainability and net-zero function. While brutalism may not be for everyone, the hotel has found a way to make a funky office space into a soothing and relaxing destination, perfect for those looking to explore Connecticut from its heart in New Haven. To plan and book your stay, visit Hotel Marcel’s website.