What”™s in a name? Plenty, for a Westchester hotel operator looking to fill rooms in a technological age of webinars and declining business travel, when one”™s travel agent has been replaced by one”™s Google search.
Try doing an online search for “Rye town,” said Alon Ben-Gurion, the general manager who has overseen a $35 million, three-phase, multiyear renovation project ”“ under three successive owners ”“ at his company”™s recently renamed hotel in Rye Brook. “I don”™t think you”™re going to find very much,” he said in the 445-room hotel”™s renovated lobby.
“The more we spoke to the clients, they said, ”˜We can”™t find it,”™” said Ben-Gurion, who came to the Hilton Rye Town in 2004 from The Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan. “You want to have the highest exposure” with a regional identity. “We needed something more general.”
So it was that after 39 years as first the Rye Town Hilton Inn and, more recently, the Hilton Rye Town, the hotel on a wooded 37-acre campus off Westchester Avenue this summer was renamed the Hilton Westchester.
The new name comes with a sweeping new look for the hotel, part of a larger undertaking of more than $3 billion in major capital projects by individual hotels in the global portfolio of Hilton Hotels & Resorts, the flagship brand of Hilton Worldwide. Walls have been torn down to create an expansive open space that runs the full length of the main hotel building and connects lobby, tech lounge and the hotel”™s new restaurant that will open this month. Ben-Gurion had the hotel pool closed off from the lobby, where kids and other guests in dripping swim suits and wet feet formerly crossed paths with arriving business guests, and added a library that adjoins the enclosed pool.
The hotel operator decided to “change the entire concept of the hotel,” Ben-Gurion said. “The beauty is to try to bring the outside into the inside. That is the major concept here. People want to see the green, they want to see the outside.”
That effect “was brought about by as much by selective demolition as it was by the new design,” architect Michael Maurer said in a press release. Maurer is principal in charge of the Hilton Westchester project for Gettys, the hospitality design and interior architecture firm that directed the renovation of the hotel”™s public spaces. A major renovation of the hotel”™s guest rooms and 34 meeting rooms was completed in 2010.
At the rear of the open public space, the hotel”™s new restaurant and lounge, härth, is scheduled to open Sept. 13. The restaurant features a centrally located wood-burning brick oven.
Executive Chef Rafael Velazquez, who came to the Hilton Westchester in 2011 from the St. Regis Bahia Beach Resort in his native Puerto Rico, is creating a wide-ranging menu that uses seasonal ingredients and the products of farms in the lower Hudson Valley ”“ among them, meats from Hemlock Hill Farm in Cortlandt Manor ”“ and features simply prepared fare that does not conceal the natural taste of ingredients. “It”™s to do as less as we can” when cooking and preparing in order to bring out the flavors of those locally sourced foods, he said.
The hotel, which employs about 220 permanent workers, was not spared the impact of the recession four years ago, when business began to plummet at hotels throughout the county. “It all was good in ”™08 until September or October, and then it all started to cave down,” Ben-Gurion said.
The Hilton had already scheduled the second phase of renovations to begin that fall. The drop-off in business that came with the recession made the project easier to carry out. “Without knowing it, it worked a little bit in our favor,” Ben-Gurion said. But the cancellations of state-sponsored and business group events and restrictions on travel hurt a hotel whose core business is “the group business,” Ben-Gurion said.
The final phase of the $35 million renovation project was completed under the hotel ownership of an investment group led by Lodging Capital Partners L.L.C., a Chicago-based company formed in 2005 that owns and manages a $1.5 billion portfolio of upper-upscale and luxury hotels in the U.S. The company paid $35.5 million in 2011 to acquire the Hilton in Rye Brook from Ashford Hospitality Trust Inc., a real estate investment trust.
“History does judge us,” said Ben-Gurion, leading a tour of the renovated areas. “History will decide whether we did it right ”“ or I will hear all about it.”
