This post is a bit of a rant about a recent hotel stay, so feel free to move it to the appropriate form if it doesn't fit here. It's about a specific Choice Hotels property, but I feel like it reflects on a general trend in a lot of hotels these days.

I recently stayed at the newly opened Gowanus Inn and Yard in Brooklyn, and my god, I think it's the worst hotel experience I've had. Not because the hotel is old and badly maintained- in fact, it's literally brand new. The problem is that they cut literally every corner they could in how they conceived of and built the hotel, and are passing it off as a design choice. It's part of Choice Hotels' Ascend Collection, which has their more 'designer' properties, and charges more than their varioius budget inns (my rate was prepaid and about $97, but some rooms for those dates went for almost $200).

The hotel is a rehabbed warehouse, so it's got that industrial chic look, which I don't necessarily hate on its own, but it seems like either the designer, the hotel chain, or both, decided to use these design choices to literally cut every single corner they could. As a few examples:

• There's no ledge to put shampoo on in the shower. Anywhere. I literally have to put my shampoo on the floor. I haven't had to do this since I was a teenager studying abroad and studying in hostels. Were a few bits of plastic too much of an investment?
• There's no coffee maker in the room. I don't mean there isn't a fancy Keurig coffee maker, there literally isn't a way to make cheap hotel instant coffee. I can get a coffeemaker in a $40 Super 8 off the highway, but apparently not in one of these design hotels.
• There's no phone in the room to call the front desk. I get that nobody's using hotel phones to actually make calls, but having a way to contact the front desk seems both useful and necessary in case there's an emergency.
• The sink is basically a slightly fancier version of an industrial type sink. Nowhere to set down a toothbrush or anything. There's a small ledge above the sink - much too high for someone as short as me, and if you bend over the sink, you hit your head on it.
• Everything is made out of those industrial chic materials, meaning hardwood floors, lots of tiles, etc. I don't really care about the aesthetic of it one way or the other, but the result is, the floor was cold, and the materials amplified sound like a microphone rather than absorbing it. Combine that with terrible soundproofing in general, and I could hear everything: doors opening and closing, the clerk at the front desk, people talking...
• There's no desk. I suppose that's understandable given what a premium space is at in new york (even Brooklyn), but I'm really sick of this trend where designers think millenials don't need desks or something. Just admit you don't want to buy desks for every room in your hotel already. It's not about design. You're just cheap.
• The hotel is designed such that the first floor rooms are literally feet away from the front desk. See above about the terrible soundproofing. I could hear the front desk clerk greeting every single guest, I could hear guests talking among themselves in the lobby, I could hear the front door of the hotel (one of those large industrial warehouse doors) opening.

I'll admit, a lot of those issues come up at hotels from time to time, but in my experience, they're usually at either budget hotels or ones that are really old. This hotel is brand new, and marketed as a 'design' hotel from the Ascend Hotels collection, and thus has a price premium compared to to the various Comfort Inns and Quality Inns this chain has in New York - yet it has the same issues, if not more, that you'd expect from a budget motel. Maybe I'm being picky and high-maintenance, but it makes me seethe that so many of these issues are being marketed as attractions or 'design elements' that make the hotel stand out. It's as insulting to me to call the lack of basic necessities 'design' as it is to call a resort fee an 'enhancement.'

And, because this is a rant, and because my problems didn't end there, here's a list of the rest of the issues I ran into during this (one night) stay:
- the front door does not lock, and there was no one at the front desk when I walked in late at night (past 10pm). There was a handwritten note saying "please call this number if you need assistance." The hotel wasn't exactly in a sketchy neighborhood, but there's rooms on the front floor and literally no security whatsoever.
- an alarm was also going off when I walked in in the evening, and no one was at the front desk. It wasn't a fire alarm - I'm really not sure what it was - but it was some kind of alarm. I call the number, inform them that there's an alarm going off and they should maybe do something about it, and a sleepy boice answers and says "I'll be right there." I have no idea where the front desk clerk was spending the night, but for some reason, it wasn't at the front desk.
-the front desk doesn't have any kind of basic necessities in case you forgot yours - a lot of hotels have toothpaste and the like if you didn't bring yours, but this one has nothing. Again, these are kind of basics here, and I was told they weren't planning on investing in anything like this.
-The shower water took literally a minute to warm up to not freezing. In a fifty room hotel.
-there was about one heat vent in the entire room, right above the bed, and the temperature control is awful. You have to set it really high to get the heat to work in any way, and then the heat becomes stifling until you turn it way down.

Basically, I'm seething and will probably contact the hotel, which is something I do very, very rarely. Thank you for listening to my lengthy rant. The tl:dr version: please never, ever stay at the Gowanus hotel. Even if you just need to sleep somewhere for one night (which was my case) and don't need bells and whistles, don't stay here. You won't even get basic necessities, and they'll charge you like a full service hotels. Just don't give them your money for your own sanity.