Moxy Times Square unveils its Yabu Pushelberg-designed rooms

Poised to open this summer, Moxy Hotel’s Times Square outpost will become the Marriott subsidiary’s inaugural New York City location. The brand is often referred to as millennial-focused, with its small guest rooms offset by a suite of communal activity spaces. Guests should expect to see nothing different in its location at 485 Seventh Avenue, between 36th and 37th streets.

Moxy Times Square assumes the old Mill Building, opened as a hotel in 1907 that would later serve as the headquarters of the New York Times. The 612-room hotel has been reformed by project architect Stonehill & Taylor and will have interiors designed by Yabu Pushelberg, with new renderings of guest rooms featured here. “We took inspiration from ocean liners,” Mitchell Hochberg, president and COO of Lightstone, the hotel’s developer, told Curbed, “where cabins were highly designed, thoughtfully designed, tastefully appointed but small.”

Hochberg says the hotel “lives in the public space” it offers, which at the Times Square location will include a 5,000-square-foot restaurant by the notoriously glitzy Tao Group, a communal lobby with a bar, private rooms where out-of-town guests can arrange for meetings or dinners, as well as a suite of more common hotel amenities. The amenity of note here, though, is the building’s indoor-outdoor rooftop lounge—the largest in the city, according to Hochberg.

Room rates at Moxy Times Square will range from around the low $200’s to the low $400’s, with room sizes varying from about 120 square feet to 350 square feet. The rooms get away with being so small because a guest’s activities in New York City are not supposed to take place in them. Hochberg says, “On an ocean liner, people wouldn’t stay in their rooms but would go out to participate in activities.” Noted.

Moxy Times Square isn’t the only outpost for the brand planned for New York. Lightstone is also developing a Moxy on 28th Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues, due to open in the beginning of 2018. The announcement of another location, across from Webster Hall on East 11th Street, caused much community and preservationist outcry in late 2016 after it was announced that five occupied tenement buildings would be razed for it. That outpost is due to open in the beginning of 2019.

• Moxy Times Square [official]