By: Cristina Velocci
October/November 2008
It used to be commonly accepted that when doing business in Big D, if you wanted to coddle your cranium in 350-thread count Egyptian cotton sheets, you had to schlep back uptown to where all the five-star hotels lived. And despite a recent influx of luxe accommodations near the central business district (W, Kimpton's Hotel Palomar, the Ritz, etc.), this truism held.
Until now, that is. Smack-dab on Main Street in a 16-story neo-Gothic landmark building that was home to the Dallas National Bank in the 1920s, The Joule, Dallas, fills this void -- and a few others in the process. For one, it marks Texas's first Luxury Collection Hotel (Starwood's most elite properties). It's also Dallas's first true design hotel, thanks to Adam Tihany, the renowned interior designer behind restaurants Le Cirque 2000 and Per Se in New York and Aureole at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.
Here, everything from the dramatic iron derrick gear slowly rotating in the lobby to the coal-black check-in desk to the hotel's name (an homage to physicist James Prescott Joule and the measurement he discovered) has a tangible energy about it. "We wanted to capture an essence of the city," Tihany says. "The metaphor kept coming up, so we created this voyage to the center of the universe. It's like going underground and being in a cocoon of energy."
