A hotel two weeks before its scheduled opening is filled with men in hard hats hammering, sawing, scraping, painting, measuring and installing carpet, electrical wiring and lighting fixtures.

Not many people are thinking about art. Art, however, is a key factor of the decor at the new Westin Memphis Beale Street Hotel, Downtown on Third Street across from FedExForum.

“The people at Westin thought about art from the very beginning,” said Mark Weaver, an architect with Hnedak Bobo Group and lead designer for the project, as he showed a reporter through the building that bustled with activity. “They want a hotel that addresses all the senses, and art is a big component.”

The Westin opened for its first guests on April 12.

Two of the company’s criteria for the art were that it should be created by local artists and that the style be abstract, not representational or figural. The Westin brand is owned by Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide, which also owns Sheraton, Le Meridien, Four Points, St. Regis, W Hotels and other brands.

“Then there’s the color scheme,” said Weaver. “It’s all earth tones, so they want something that will be good art but also harmonious overall.”

One of the local design team’s motivations was to avoid the obvious themes: the history of Memphis, the river, music.

“There’s plenty of that around here,” said Weaver. “We went with more water and landscape ideas, though still mostly abstract. It’s part of the Westin brand: clean, subdued, modernist. For example, there are no moldings, for a clean look, and we went with dark wood for casual elegance.”

To find original artworks for the public areas of the new Westin — guest rooms have standard art — Weaver turned to Jay Etkin Gallery, a fixture on South Main Street. Hnedak Bobo had worked with Etkin on other projects, notably several casino hotels in Tunica.

The process took about eight months, according to Etkin.

“My job from the onset was to present a group of artists that I thought were appropriate,” he said. “I presented more artists than there were commissions available, rather than me dictating who the artists would be.”

The design team — Greg Hnedak, principal and co-founder of Hnedak Bobo; Weaver; and interior designers Kwannet Keyes and Jennifer Miller — eventually settled on works by the artists Pam Cobb, Richard Knowles, Jon Lee, Hank Gray, Sandy Robinson and Deborah Brown.

The final budget for the project was about $60,000, considerably higher than the initial proposal.

“The first budget figure was unrealistic,” said Etkin. “I had to convince the people in corporate that to get the kind of art that would be a good reflection of the hotel, it needed to be more. It doubled or tripled from the original estimate.

“Still, they’re getting a lot of art for the dollar. It’s a highly visible commission, really significant art for a significant hotel.”

“A lot of art” means 14 paintings ranging in size from 2-by-2 feet to 11-by-4 feet.

Cobb produced seven of those pieces, including the hotel’s signature art work, three 101/2 -by-3-foot paintings displayed side by side in the lobby.

“I was very nervous,” said the artist. “Not about the doing of it, but when we went through the walk-through early on and I saw the space where the pieces were going to hang, I went, ‘Oh, my gosh,’ because you walk through the front door and there they are.”

Cobb is used to working on a large scale — she just finished a mural for the Downtown elementary school — but the only room in her East Memphis house tall enough to accommodate these panels, and the 11-foot one, was her entrance hall.

However nervous she may have been and however hard she worked within the allotted time, Cobb said that she was “excited and grateful” for the exposure the project provided.

The allotted time seemed to drag on.

“We could have done this months ago,” said Etkin, “but in a corporate situation it takes time to go through the channels and get various permissions. The artists were on stand-by until we got final approval. Most of them dropped other things to do these commissions.”

Still, Etkin said, “It was a better situation than many hotels give you. I’ve worked on art with hotels where they just say, ‘Make a proposal and we’ll see where the stuff goes.’ With Westin, they knew down to the inch what they wanted.”

– Fredric Koeppel: 529-2376

source : www.commercialappeal.com

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