Project Name: W Boston

Location: Boston

Date Completed: 2019

Interior Designer: Dawson Design Associates, Inc. 

To be Bostonian, means to embraces the City’s unique dichotomy of good and bad, sin and sinners, witches and puritans. The City of stark contrasts, of rich history and a reputation for being inherently rebellious. This is the foundation from what DDA built the new attitude of the W Boston. DDA dove into the rich art scene, its illustrious rock n’ roll heritage where the rebellious spirit of the City’s dissenting political past set the stage for musicians like Aerosmith and The Cars. The guestroom carpets inspired by Steven Tyler’s famous stripped pants. They went to the dark side and played with the poems of Edgar Allan Poe, whose boyhood home lies right around the corner. They designed a light fixture as a ‘pendulum’; an articulating floor lamp swinging over a cheeky game board.

DDA really enjoyed interpreting the poems into a visual experience and symbolism and discovered in doing so how Aerosmith and the Cars also had used his poems in many of their works. The dark poems still very relevant today in the swinging of the pendulum and the fine line between good and evil and how it can be distorted. 

In the guestrooms, the colonial influence is seen in the elegant but skewed lines of a jig saw style raised panel headboard in inky black, that covers most of the wall. A puritan history recognised and celebrated in the simple lines of a ‘colonial cupboard’ turned into a guestroom bar. 

In the Penthouse WOW Suite, DDA created a tribute to Poe and his famous poems, both dark and light in execution. Artwork was commissioned from Spanish artist, Antonio Mora, who created wall murals of flames, ravens and smoke in homage to Poe’s many dark writings.

The hotel itself is a glass tower. Floor to ceiling windows, with rooms often angular and skewed, meant that the designers had to stay very contemporary in our abstracted interpretation of historical details. Lines needed to be slightly twisted and distorted to fuse effectively with the architecture.