Rooms With a Viewpoint
Yes, views, thread counts, spas, and Internet connections are still important, but increasingly both leisure travelers and groups want assurances of a hotel's green bona fides. San Francisco's newest hotel is intent on leading the pack. Joan Chatfield-Taylor reports.
Joan Chatfield-Taylor reports.
The InterContinental San Francisco, 32 slender stories of curvaceous glass located near the Moscone Convention Center, is the city's first newly constructed hotel in 20 years. The exterior may glitter immodestly, but the first thing you notice inside is invisible: the air is fresh and just slightly breezy, pretty much like a typical San Francisco day. The resemblance is no accident: Fresh air is one of the requirements for the Gold Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification the 550 room hotel is seeking, a rating that hotel management expects will make it the largest LEED-certified hotel in California.
"Guests definitely express interest, and groups are being encouraged to use LEED hotels," says manager Peter Koehler. The political climate is also changing. Now this is being encouraged. It wasn't important under the Bush administration."
Although Continental Development Corporation of El Segundo, California, opted not to apply for the stringent LEED rating when it started the design process nine years ago, it planned to ask for an "existing building" rating once the building opened in February 2008. To this end, the developers spent some extra money during the construction process for mold-free drywall and for their own transformer, which helped save $300,000 on the anticipated first year electricity bill.
"We made the design flexible enough that we could do it later without having to move walls," explains Leonard Blakesley Jr., executive vice president of Continental. "What we're doing now is complicated, but it's not as difficult as converting an old building."
It wasn't hard to install a single solar panel to power the recycling compactor, but achieving the perfect balance of air temperature and pressure throughout its 32 stories required retrocommissioning the HVAC system. Today, when a guest checks in, the registration computer tells the thermostat in the guest's room to wake up and adjust the temperature by the time the guest opens the door. When the guest leaves the room, an infrared sensor tells the computer to turn down the heat and open the draperies during the day. The system, by INNCOM, is sensitive enough that it can be programmed to let VIP guests exercise more control over their rooms.
The automated opening of the curtains is just one aspect of a LEED requirement to maximize the use of natural light. The program will eventually include sensors to turn off lights in the hotel's over 40,000 square feet of meeting space when no one's in the rooms.
The hotel is aiming to recycle 75 per cent of its waste. To make presorting easier, the marble-topped cabinets in meeting rooms are being adapted to house recycling bins, and recycling containers have been placed within arm's reach of prep areas in the kitchens.
"The more efficient the recycling, the less we pay in garbage services," Koehler notes. "In our first year of operation, we saved more than $80,000."
Recycling, he emphasizes, is only part of the solution. "The mantra is reduce, reuse, and recycle, but most people get it backward."
Instead, he wants to reduce waste before it ever gets into the building. That means working closely with suppliers, establishing standards for everything from new carpets to bars of soap.
To cut down on transport, LEED favors products from within 500 miles of the building and food products from a 100 mile radius. Buying local has not been a problem for the InterContinental's high-end restaurant, Luce, where chef Dominique Crenn fashions her refined Italian-California cuisine mainly from the agricultural riches of nearby Napa and Sonoma Counties. Coffee may not be local, but it's fair trade and shade-grown, from Equator Estate Coffees & Teas in San Rafael, the kind of detail that LEED encourages.
Although Koehler says that the certification process has been invisible to the guests, every employee of the hotel is involved one way or another. In addition to Jubilee Daniels, the outside consultant hired as the required LEED-accredited professional, 16 students from San Francisco State University's Hospitality Management Department are helping out. The hotel also works with Pacific Gas and Electric Company and the California Department of Energy to achieve savings.
Koehler anticipates that the hotel will receive its Gold certification, or at least Silver, by next spring. Although he did not estimate the costs of meeting the standards, he says, "We will have net positive cash flow at the end of the process, and payback will be achieved in two or three years."
Based on other hotels' experience, the LEED stamp of approval is expected to raise both the value of the real estate and the occupancy rate about 10 percent. Blakesley even predicts that the savings in energy and other costs will make lower room rates available.
According to Marie Coleman of the U.S. Green Building Council, the nonprofit organization that administers LEED, there are currently only 31 LEED-certified hotels in the United States, but another 869 are pursuing the rating. Although there's no specific LEED standard for hotels, she says, "The USGBC is working to develop solutions that make adoption of LEED as feasible and effective as possible for the hospitality market."
In the meantime, the InterContinental is in touch with at least 50 potential applicants through a biweekly conference call from hotels interested in every detail of the process.
Joan Chatfield-Taylor is a San Francisco-based freelance writer.
