Unique new h2hotel is Californian creative, eco-friendly

Circe Sher, one of the owners of the h2hotel in Healdburg, stands on one of the balconies on the property that was scheduled to open July 1.

GREEN HOTEL PROFILE: The uber-green wine country boutique hotel has eco-friendly features such as a living roof and ultra-low water use, as well as a radical design.

Even its name — h2hotel — defies conventional grammar. But no matter. Developers are betting that the lower-case iteration will make intuitive sense to the texting generation that the boutique Healdsburg hotel, which officially opened July 1, aims to attract.

As Paolo Petrone, managing partner in the uber-green new hotel puts it, “The idea is to go to the edge to get the edgier crowd.”

Even before the power tools had been silenced and put away, some 542 followers had “friended” the four-story, 36-room boutique hotel on Facebook — already sold out for the July 4 weekend — thanks in part to publicist Scott Keneally’s millennial-style marketing, which includes manufacturing buzz on the h2blog.

Conceived as a smaller, sassier and less expensive sibling to the sophisticated Hotel Healdsburg just up the street, the $19 million h2hotel features radical design elements aimed at appealing primarily to a younger crowd — older millennials to younger boomers.

There’s a fireplace of bound, copper, Steinway piano strings by Oakland art fabricator Leonidas Kyriakopoulos. There’s commissioned art with an eco-bent, including a monumental fountain comprised of 2,000 espresso spoons by Sebastopol kinetic artist Ned Kahn and a photographic study of a California live oak printed on glass by Sonoma State University professor Stephen Galloway that unfolds in 8-foot sections, one on each floor. There’s a bank of brightly colored, three-speed Dutch bikes — the latest enterprise from design guru Rob Forbes of Design Within Reach — available for guests and kept in their own cool, glass storage cube with service station.

San Francisco architect David Baker, who also designed the Hotel Healdsburg, said careful thought was given to design, not only for appearance or cost, but for usability, all in keeping with the modernist philosophy of form-follows-function.

Closets easily accommodate today’s rolling luggage. Showers were re-thought so you can adjust the head and temperature before stepping in without getting blasted. All beds can be converted into either kings or twins to accommodate couples or friends traveling together. With the wall-mounted, 42-inch, flat-screen TVs, there’s no need for the hulking ’80s armoires, so the rooms are sleeker.

 “This is like the Apple — the iHotel — because it’s actually easy to use,” said Baker. “People realize you pay a little more and you get something that is really useful and isn’t frustrating all the time.”

The hub of the lobby is an experiment in one-stop hotel service that developers have dubbed the “receptobar.” Check-in, concierge service, and coffee bar by day and wine bar by night, it will also be the central spot to stock up on snacks, DVDs, games and outdoor supplies. Self-serve keeps costs down. Each room comes with an old-fashioned glass milk bottle that guests can fill up themselves with sparkling or still water at watering stations on each floor, avoiding plastic.

“We have a lot of premium items available, but you just go do it yourself,” said marketing director Circe Sher, whose father Merritt is a partner in both the Healdsburg and h2 hotels. “You wear flip-flops downstairs and grab whatever you need and sit by the pool or hop on a loaner bike.”

The lobby is the “chill space” with mod Mah Jong-like sectional couches and stackable cushions in splashy Italian Missoni fabrics, known for their bright colors and contrasting textures.

Clever economies help bring the cost of a room down to $195-$595 compared to $295-$820 at the Hotel Healdsburg, said Circe.

Petrone and the Shers envision the hotel as the inn of choice for the aesthetically cool young professional with a little less cash but who also wants to be ecologically correct. It is LEED certified, a stringent and independently verifiable rating system for green building construction.
 “It just seemed like it’s the right thing to do on this site,” says Circe Sher.

Built on the property of a former Chevron station, the 30,000-square-foot hotel packs a lot on a compact, 27,000-square-foot lot, stretching space with balconies and second-floor patios.

The hotel takes its water theme from Foss Creek, which runs behind it. The restoration of the creek has been a pet project of Petrone and Sher starting with the Hotel Healdsburg. The company has been working in partnership with the Redwood Empire chapter of Trout Unlimited and the Russian Riverkeepers to clean up a roughly quarter-mile stretch of the creek and restore the habitat of native steelhead trout that once thrived there.

The interiors are eco-sensitive, using natural and sustainable materials, like bamboo floors and textiles of recycled materials, but with an ultra-modern touch. Paco Pierro’s Picassa Studios in Oakland used reclaimed elm and black acacia, locally grown and sourced, for the dining tables and a massive single long communal table. The floor for a yoga room/meeting room was salvaged from an old gym. Bathroom tiles came from the classic Heath Ceramics in Sausalito.

The water and ecology themes thread through the design as well. The living roof with its watery wave was designed by American Hydrotech (which designed the roof of the new California Academy of Sciences) and installed by Bertotti Landscaping in Petaluma. It captures rainwater to reduce runoff into the creek and stores it in a tank to feed the Kahn water sculpture, a centerpiece of the hotel’s hip Spoonbar Restaurant. Solar collectors gather energy both for electricity and heating water — a major energy drain in hotels.

Kahn, whose inventive and animated works include the shimmering panels on the AT&T building in Santa Rosa and a piece made from 200,000 mirrored disks at the San Francisco Airport that move in response to the air currents from passing BART trains, looked long and hard for just the right spoons. In the middle of assembling “Spoonfall,” 2,000 hinged spoons that fill with water and tip their contents in a sequential cascade, the spoon manufacturer went out of business. A panicked Kahn had all but given up hope of finding the 1,000 more he needed to complete the fountain when he got a tip that the overstock was sitting in a warehouse in Stockholm.

 “I loved the drawing and all the plants for the hotel,” he says. “I’m really jazzed to see it become real.”

Valere Tjolle
Source: meg.mcconahey, pressdemocrat.com.