I recently went to Boston’s Theatre District to see the W Hotel, a project that I wrote the hardware spec for a few years ago.  The opening date for the hotel is October 22nd, with the condos on the upper floors to follow.  The architectural firm is one I’ve worked with many times – TRO/Jung Brannen.

Whenever I’ve mentioned this project, the person I’ve mentioned it to gets a confused look on his/her face and says, “WHERE is it?  The Theatre District??”

Although there aren’t many vacant building lots in the Theatre District, they somehow found a way to squeeze a high-rise hotel into what used to be a parking lot on the corner of Tremont and Stuart Streets.  If you’d like to call the Theatre District “home”, condos at the W Hotel are currently priced between $430,000 and $4.55 million.

There was an interesting door & hardware application on this project that we spent a lot of time discussing during design, so I made sure to check and see how it worked out.  On the hotel floors, there are 2 guest rooms at the end of the hall that can be booked individually or as a suite.  When they are individual rooms, the doors need to be fire-rated and have hotel guest room locks.  When they are booked as a suite, there’s an unequal leaf pair that becomes the suite entrance, and the other entry doors become essentially bedroom doors.

The unequal leaf pair at the end of the corridor needed to be held open as long as the rooms were booked individually, with only authorized hotel personnel having the ability to release the hold-opens.  The doors open into a pocket (always challenging to coordinate) and are hung on pocket pivots.  To ensure that only authorized personnel can release the hold-opens, I specified Schlage Electronics 320+ mag-locks, which provide more holding force than a typical magnetic holder.  If you saw my earlier post about pocket pivots, the close-up below illustrates how much tighter the clearance is between the door and frame when pocket pivots are used vs. the swing-clear hinges used in the previous post.

There were plenty of other special applications on this project, including more doors held open in pockets, guest room entry doors with sliding bathroom doors behind them, wardrobe doors with concealed hinges, etc., but one of my favorite finds of the day was on the main entrance doors.  I guarantee that 499 out of 500 people walking past these doors wouldn’t notice that the door pulls are temporary pulls made out of PVC pipe.  Very creative!

You can read more about the construction progress at the Boston Real Estate Observer site, or see more photos and reserve a room at W Hotels Worldwide.

 Satellite image courtesy of Google Maps.

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