Ellenville Hotel
diagrammatic viewpoints
Summary
This project began not with answers, but with questions. How might a hotel be conceived from the inside-out? How can architecture host both immersion in nature and the intimacy of hospitality? How does one retreat to a town—not quite city, not quite country—from both directions at once? Two hours outside New York City, this self-initiated development began at the smallest scale—the hotel room—and grew into a building that is both enclave and landscape.
Idea
What if subtraction could create abundance? By stepping back and carving away from the volume, the architecture multiplies its connections to view and sky. A minimalist form becomes maximal in experience: each removal of matter expands the horizon, every setback becomes an aperture to nature.
Expression
The hotel inhabits a historic thoroughfare in a quiet upstate town. Its form is pared back, respectful, and yet distinctly contemporary. It is a building that calms—anchored in the rhythm of its context, but marked by gestures that make it feel at once timeless and new. A retreat that does not declare itself, but reveals itself.
Impact
As both design and development, completed with neighbor, the project aims for resonance rather than disruption. Its presence is complementary, not corrective—a building that feels inevitable, as though it had always belonged to the town. By intervening lightly yet deliberately, the hotel redefines hospitality as a continuum: between city and country, between nature and enclosure, between past and future.