Arts & History Join To Create A Hotel Like Nothing You’ve Seen Before - And It’s Right Here in St. Louis.

The Angad Arts Hotel is like no hotel you’ve seen before - and it’s right here in St. Louis.

“We tried to challenge the norms of what you think about in every instance,” said developer Steve Smith, Founding Principal and CEO of the Lawrence Group about the hotel that emerged from a $65 million dollar, five-year renovation of the old Missouri Theater Building in Grand Center.

To start, the main entrance is in the back of the building (off Samuel Shepard Drive) to accommodate the busy nature of Grand Ave. - especially before and after shows.

Second, the lobby is on the 12th floor, a creative change that allows everyone to appreciate the fantastic views of St. Louis from the top floors where the Rainbow Terrace, Chameleon Lounge and playroom are located.

When you enter the hotel you’re greeted by an art gallery and are invited to take an express elevator up to the Chameleon Lounge and lobby - so named for the fantastical, gigantic Chameleon Lamp that greets you as the doors open.

“The doors open up and you have this giant lamp with this video display. I enjoy sitting there and watching people come up off the elevator - the eyes get wide, the jaw drops, and the camera comes out,” said Smith.

The 12-foot tall and 12-foot in diameter sculpture has original video art from Zlatko Ćosić that plays on the lampshade 24 hours a day. It’s one of many aspects of the hotel designed with Instagram in mind. Ćosić also created the video art in the elevators.

And the third main difference from normal hotels - perhaps the most striking difference - is the rooms.

The vast majority of hotels are done in neutrals, but Angad has four different rooms that are saturated in four different colors to affect your mode when staying there - blue for tranquility, green for rejuvenation, yellow for happiness, and red for passion. And when Smith says saturated, he means it, nearly everything is the chosen color, from the walls down to the rubber duck in the bathroom.

“You can’t fully describe the experience of being saturated in color. People walk into these rooms on tours and have an audible reaction,” said Smith. The Lawrence Group believes they are not only the only hotel in St. Louis with this practice, but the only hotel in the world.

“Angad is infused with the arts, throughout the design of the hotel. We have sculpture, paintings, video art, fashion, culinary arts, the architecture, and interior design - every aspect of the design is celebrating St. Louis artists,” Smith explained.

Smith chose this location purposefully. Over the past couple years Grand Center has seen a slate of renovations with many of the historic buildings in the area renovated (often by Steve Smith’s Lawrence Group) and filled again with life. This building - The Missouri Theater Building on the National Register of Historic Places - was the one exception.

The historic building was constructed as companion offices in 1920 to the former Missouri Theatre, which has since been demolished, but once stood to the east. It was, among other uses, the original home of the Radio City Rockettes who began as the Missouri Rockettes in the 1920s.

“Because of our big city roots over the last 150 years, St. Louis is blessed with beautiful architecture - more so, I think, than the peer cities we would compare ourselves to today,” Smith explained.

Andrew Weil, the executive director at the Landmarks Association agrees, calling the rehab “the last piece to the puzzle” of a revitalized Grand Center. He also notes that this rehab is one of many in recent years.

Rehabbing historic buildings is particularly important to Smith.
“Personally, I’ve been involved in preserving and restoring that heritage and that history. I think it's a differentiator for our community and sometimes taken for granted by those of us who grew up here,” he said.

Though Smith choose this building in particular to become the 146 room hotel (25 of which are extended stay rooms with kitchenettes), he acknowledges restoring historic structures does not come without its challenges.

“Nothing is square, nothing lines up, we discovered that the columns on the 12th floor are a lot smaller than the columns in the 4th floor so that made buying and placing furniture complicated,” Smith said. “But we’re used to that at the Lawrence Group, and with those challenges is the opportunity to take an old building and put a new twist on it, and a lot of the challenges led to the opportunity to do something really unique, and fun and different.”

“The Lawrence Group is a fabulous asset for St. Louis and have taken on some very tough projects such as the Sun Theater building just down the street in Grand Center. They are highly skilled and I hope it’s very, very successful,” said Weil.

Smith’s high hopes for the project seem to be paying off with visitors from near and far.

“We see this as a gathering place in the Grand Center Arts District. A hotel is, in a way, a home that is open to a public. As such, a hotel is unique in its ability to be a gathering place - where people can meet, have a drink, socialize, enjoy each other, have a meal, events happen - but ours will center around arts and creativity and imagination,” said Smith.

“As you walk through the building, the art, video art, We do have a great cultural foundation here in St. Louis and we wanted to celebrate that and promote that. The design and the art of this hotel is about St. Louis and by St. Louisans.”