Since the 1920s, the Flatiron Building has been a centerpiece of Asheville, NC’s Historic District. Once housing the city’s oldest radio station, the triangular, Art Deco building had been the home to many businesses through the years.
Today, following an extensive adaptive-reuse project, the building has been turned into The Flat Iron Hotel, a 71-room boutique property managed by The Indigo Road Hospitality Group, which opened last May.
It was still an active office building when Carrie Dessertine, owner, Mey & Co., the designer on the project, first visited the nine-story structure. In fact, she shared, “the MEP [mechanical, electrical and plumbing] engineer who followed the project all the way through used to have what is now one of the hotel’s suites as his office for 35 years.”
The building itself served as inspiration for the design, she noted, adding, “The idea was to take the ethos of the building and develop the hotel and the guestroom style around that. The building had just a lot of DNA to work with.”
The triangular core and corridors of the original building were retained in the hotel’s design, as were the terrazzo floors and glass office doors.
“The doors were kept where they were, but when we needed a new door, we used new glass panel doors, and, of course, the glass doesn’t go through to the guestroom side because that would be a nightmare,” said Dessertine. “We made sure that the feel you get when you walk through the corridor still remains like you could be walking to your accountant’s office.”
The designer called the lobby “this lovely jewel box with pink marble that wraps up the grand stair, and we couldn’t touch that.” The original elevator doors also remain.
“One of the things we did in that lobby is we worked with an artist out of Brooklyn who develops murals, and she developed a seven-panel mural,” Dessertine noted. “We worked with her on the specific color direction and the look and feel. Each of the little vignettes in the mural are moments around Asheville and North Carolina.”
In the guestrooms, the carpets are designed from “a custom pattern that we designed that is meant to be a play on the ‘Land of the Sky’ nickname of Asheville,” she said. “It has this sunburst that dithers out from each of the window walls, and then the base of it is this emerald, earthy green. The headboards are lavender in a worn, heathered fabric, so it feels not brand new. Overall, the guestrooms are very green heavy, for both the lush hillsides that you see out the windows and the copper patina from the exterior of the building.”
Each of the other public spaces, she said, “has its own language,” adding, “In Luminosa restaurant, we wanted that warmth of the wood paneling to be the main design element. That’s paired with the neutral black-and-white floor, and then we just have these moments of red that come in. The speakeasy down below was the building’s boiler room, and one of the boiler room doors remains on the wall. That space really did want to feel underground in a lot of ways, so we went very dark.”
Since The Indigo Road puts a heavy focus on food and beverage, much time and detail was spent into designing Luminosa, an Italian eatery.
“Steve Palmer [The Indigo Road’s founder/managing partner] wanted this restaurant to feel original to the building,” said Dessertine. “I think the wood paneling does a lot of that work. We tried to accentuate its history in that the space used to be four or five bays of different storefronts. When we first toured the building, there was a glasses store and a coffee shop. All of that got opened up to be the vista of the restaurant, but keeping these cased openings with striped curtains to keep that metering through the space, and we pocketed little seating moments in them. Also, we love to populate spaces with lots of plants, so there are these four storefronts that have this cascade of greenery above them, which also felt right for Asheville.”
