Opportunities abound for engineering encounters between guests and their food in the landscape – a breakfast orangerie where fruit is freshly plucked for juice, courtyard gardens planted in orchards of nuts and fruits, herbal lawns at the spa, a poolside planted with date palms.
Many hotels are integrating local and on-site food production in a range of innovative ways, to draw in guests and enrich their experience. From roof-top vegetable gardens to bee-keeping, on-site goats, curing meats and homemade wine, these hotels are fully explore the relationship between local food production and hospitality.
Articles such as this one in the New York Times feature urban hotels that make more of the produce than just an ingredient. Some of the most intriguing strategies include the Elysian Hotel in Chicago that not only serves a local farm-based menu created around available produce, but also leases land at the Heritage Prairie Farm to grow specialty vegetables and keep bees.
Such a partnership benefits the hotel (chefs and bartenders request heirloom vegetables for signature menu items) but also, presumably, the farm which has a guaranteed income from the hotel while keeping the land in production. In this way the hotel’s buying practices become a form of activism that conserves working farmlands near urban areas.
Another partnership worth noting also takes place in Chicago, where the Marriott Downtown uses honey from their rooftop hives to create a special beer, made in partnership with a local brewer. Again, while the hotel gets a unique item to market, the brewery might benefit from a dedicated revenue stream.
One hospitality/agricultural project on the boards at SWA is the St. Regis Napa Valley. Tucked behind rolling hills, the resort – a combination of 175 hotel rooms, cottages, hillside units and 70 estate dwellings, will blend seamlessly into the landscape on a small portion of the Stanly Ranch winery. The masterplan calls for 50% of the site to remain in open space, 40% of that in working agriculture.
This is a slightly modified version of a post originally published on GrowCity, November 1, 2010.
Posted by EllenBurke in Arts and Culture, Urban Agriculture on