Browse Items (91 total)

View of the Willard's Grand Ballroom before the renovation took place. There are over 7,000 square feet of marble floors on the ground level of the hotel. Over one and a half million ¾ inch square pieces were refitted, some lifted out, cleaned and…

An 1853 engraving depicting President Franklin Pierce leaving the Willard Hotel.

In 1820, Joshua Tennyson leased the property at Pennsylvania Avenue and Fourteenth Street from Captain John Tayloe to run a hotel just a few blocks from the White…

The Tahara’a InterContinental (1968-1974) was designed by the architectural firm Wimberly, Allison, Tong & Goo (WATG), The team created an “upside down” building where the lobby and restaurants were on the top floor and the guest rooms were on the…

Many “native” elements incorporated into the hotel decor, including a 25 foot tiki that stood in front of the hotel’s thatched-roofed building, had to be outsourced to Oceanic Arts in Whittier, California due to a scarcity of craftsmen (the locals…

The Tahara'a InterContinental Hotel (1968-1974) had two levels of public areas rising above the guest rooms: a dining room, bar, pool, recreation area, and nightclub. Prince took his interior design cues from the ocean, working with a palette of…

When Prince was designing the Tahara’a, he was catering to an American fantasy of the South Pacific, formed by movies like Blue Hawaii and the tiki bars of the 1960s. In the more casual indoor and outdoor dining spaces, common features include…

The hotel (in operation from 1968-1974) was dramatically perched on a cliff above one of Tahiti’s famed black sand beaches, with descending tiers of rooms spread out below the ridge of the hill and balcony trellises draped in bougainvillea. Each room…

When Prince thought the area devoted to the pool was too small for a luxury resort, he tackled the problem through design: he created undulating waves of blue, green, and white tile that flowed across the terrace into the swimming pool, that, when…

Inter-Continental brought in leading American architect Edward Durell Stone to complete the design with Joseph Salerno, an architect who had worked on Inter-Continental’s Curacao hotel in Brazil.

Interiors and swimming pools designed by Neal…

Exterior ground-level view of the Siam InterContinental Bangkok and its reflective lily pond which surrounds the front of the building. The main building and roof were controversial, reminding Prince Kukrit Pramoj of a crematorium. The hotel was in…