By Jared Ebersole in Video 23 Oct 2026

ModernHaus SoHo and the Value of Leaving Space

At this SoHo hotel, lifting the guestroom tower created something a solid building could not: a layered landscape of gardens, gathering places, and elevated views.

At street level, a hotel has an obvious incentive to fill every available inch. More enclosed space can mean more rooms, more restaurant tables, or a larger entrance announcing the property to passing traffic. ModernHaus SoHo makes a different architectural argument: sometimes a building gains character by opening up its base.

At 27 Grand Street, the hotel’s guestroom tower rises above a layered arrangement of landscape and communal spaces. The resulting gaps are central to its identity. They give a relatively compact hotel room to breathe and turn the journey away from the sidewalk into part of the stay.

The building opened as The James New York on September 1, 2010, with 114 guestrooms and suites. Designed by ODA in collaboration with Perkins Eastman, it later became ModernHaus SoHo. Its most enduring idea predates the newer name: lift the private accommodation and use the space around and beneath it to make arrival memorable. The James opening announcement

Where it is

ModernHaus SoHo
27 Grand Street
New York, NY

ODA identifies that address in its original project record, which describes the hotel as a stilted structure with spaces carved from the typical tower form.

The address matters because this is a building experienced at two scales. From farther away, it reads as a tower. Up close, the more interesting question is how that tower meets the city. A conventional base might settle the question with a continuous wall of rooms and circulation. Here, the lower levels become a sequence of places to move through, look across, and occupy.

That distinction gives the video’s apparent paradox its substance. Space beneath a tower can look unused when judged only by the number of bedrooms it contains. Judged as part of a hotel, it can perform several jobs at once: frame an entrance, accommodate landscape, establish privacy, and create somewhere guests want to linger.

The original arrival sequence made that approach particularly clear. Perkins Eastman describes an entrance tucked beneath the landscape, followed by a glass elevator carrying guests to a double-height reception and lounge approximately 30 feet above the garden and surrounding streets. The ascent was an architectural transition, bringing visitors from the pavement into an elevated shared room. Perkins Eastman’s project description

An elevator normally compresses a journey into a few unremarkable seconds. Giving it glass walls makes those seconds useful. The changing viewpoint allows the landscape and street to become part of the experience, while the elevated lobby establishes a different relationship with the neighborhood. Guests arrive within the city, then gain a little distance from its immediate activity.

The structure supports that sense of separation. Perkins Eastman describes branching, tree-like columns beneath the guest accommodation, with pathways and terraces forming a park-like setting around the lower levels. The columns carry the building while allowing the base to remain visually more open. Landscape becomes part of the composition rather than a strip added after the tower is finished. Perkins Eastman

There is also a useful zoning principle behind the video’s story, although it needs careful handling. New York regulates building size partly through floor area ratio, usually shortened to FAR. The ratio compares a building’s zoning floor area with the area of its zoning lot. It measures development intensity; it does not, by itself, prescribe a particular number of stories.

The city’s Zoning Handbook illustrates the distinction with buildings of equal floor area distributed across different footprints. A broad, low building and a narrower, taller one can have the same FAR. Other rules still govern what can actually be built, but the basic arithmetic explains why the placement of floor space matters as much as its quantity. New York City Zoning Handbook

For a hotel, that becomes a design question with commercial consequences. Where should the bedrooms sit? How much of the site should the building cover? Which spaces benefit from proximity to the street, and which benefit from elevation? An upper room and a lower room may occupy similar areas while offering very different experiences.

An open base does not automatically produce additional development rights. Nor does a floor area limit guarantee a fixed room count, since circulation, services, and shared facilities also need space. The useful lesson is about arranging a finite building: concentrating accommodation in a tower can leave room for other experiences below. Whether those choices command a particular price premium requires separate evidence.

The original hotel already treated its shared spaces as attractions. Its opening announcement promoted an urban garden and a rooftop pool, giving the property distinct outdoor destinations at different heights. The architecture offered guests reasons to move through the building beyond the necessary trip between reception and bedroom. The James opening announcement

That framework survived the later transformation into ModernHaus. Palette Architecture’s refurbishment, completed in May 2021, worked within the existing footprint while introducing warmer materials and stronger colors. Its published account describes interventions across the hotel’s communal spaces, including changes to the rooftop bar and its connection to the pool deck. Palette Architecture’s refurbishment account

The renovation demonstrates a practical consequence of the original design. Furnishings, finishes, and hospitality concepts can change while the building’s spatial organization continues to provide value. Terraces, an elevated gathering place, and a distinctive relationship between tower and ground are substantial assets to inherit. A new identity can develop around them.

Seen this way, ModernHaus is a study in how subtraction can organize a building. The opening beneath the guest accommodation gives the tower a recognizable stance, while the spaces around it make the lower levels destinations in their own right. The apparent absence is doing architectural work.

The hotel’s strongest move is therefore visible before anyone reaches a bedroom. It makes the passage from street to stay feel deliberate. What first appears to be space sacrificed becomes the setting for the experience the building sells.