Ace Hotel / Everything Will Be Okay

August 13th, 2010

Ladies, gentlemen, and everyone else. We present to you the third and final mystery song for Take Cover, our music contest with Howie Pyro, the grand prize for which is a brand new car! Just kidding! It’s actually a Levi’s Pioneer Sessions Limited Edition Crosley Turntable! So listen carefully, and guess wisely. We’ll announce the genius next week.

Come see Howie spin tonight in the desert. We’ve got a Desert Facial with fresh mint and your name on it. And Howie’s picking out some good stuff from his 45s…

August 9th, 2010

We weren’t sure you would be able to do it, but we stand corrected. Lewis Winter solved last week’s Take Cover without a hitch. For those of you who were left guessing, it was German clarinetist Rolf Kühn covering Black Sabbath’s Paranoid.

This week is the third and final round of Take Cover. We’re giving the winner a Levi’s Pioneer Sessions Limited Edition Crosley Turntable. So stay tuned for the mystery song. Bonus points for anyone who sends us a video of themselves covering their favorite song on an unusual instrument. All guesses, performances, and musings should be directed here.

August 6th, 2010

TAKE COVER : WEEK TWO

Our next round of Take Cover takes it up a few notches. You have to guess the song and the artist covering it. As you may remember, this is the second of three rounds of the contest. We’re giving Ace t-shirts (and other assorted treats — whatever we feel like putting in the envelope) as the prize booty for the first two weeks. But for the third and final round, contenders will compete tooth and nail for a Levi’s Pioneer Sessions Limited Edition Crosley Turntable. Howie, our wild and punishing host, is going to find the weirdest thing he’s got. Something your iPhone has no chance in hell of detecting.

Howie’s spinning Intoxica Radio Live tonight in the Amigo Room at Ace Palm Springs. Come for a drink and see if you can pick up any clues…

A send your guesses for this week to contest@acehotel.com. Tally ho!

Prize Fight by Edward Hart, b. 1847, from Ravishing Beasts.

July 13th, 2010

We just went to LA to help Levi’s throw a party to celebrate the launch of their Care to Air campaign. The event was part of Dwell Magazine’s Dwell On Design 2010 — a gathering of industries and people who understand that sustainability makes fashion and design even more inspiring and sexy. We made drinks and food using elements of our edible landscape in Palm Springs and gave guests handmade gifts of little succulents in jars. We also used one whole room of the Levi’s West Hollywood showroom to recreate our design studio, using Levi’s sense of heritage and the inspiration and design behind each of our hotels to give the feeling that you had just stepped into someone’s intimate workspace —- an old fan fluttered pictures and notes on the wall, little lamps focused attention on spools of thread and French bio-architecture books, and a dice game was underway. Here are some photos from this little world we created — a feast of everything that has inspired us so far with hints of what’s to come.

Photography by Alex Wyman. Design and additional photos by Valentine Freeman and Belin Liu.

May 13th, 2010

» ANDREWANDREW GUEST POST «

AndrewAndrew found a living legend at The Ace Hotel in Palm Springs! Linda is the hostess at the King’s Highway Cafe and she servers up a steaming platter of pure charm and talent. Watch AndrewAndrew and Linda talk shop — a shop that features Broadway, fashion (with a capital F!), Elton John, and Barbra Streisand. Just don’t complain to her about the wait…

Linda also hosts Rose Tattoo Bingo every Monday night in the Amigo Room, where she scandalizes, charms, and bestows prizes.

May 5th, 2010

INAUGURAL » ANDREWANDREW GUEST POST

Lights, Camera, Fashion! The always dapper AndrewAndrew reports on the state of fashion during Desert Gold at the Levis® 501 Suite at the Ace Hotel & Swim Club in sunny Palm Springs, California and helps to answer the all important questions of proper desert dressing.

April 1st, 2010

Ace Goes to SXSW

We joined our friends at Levi’s and Converse for SXSW and created a very special VIP area for performers. A room from Ace Palm Springs sprung up in the Levi’s Fader Fort where the bands hung out while Will Bryant customized their Converse kicks.

The festival was packed with new and old friends, including Andrew and Andrew — who were there interviewing bands and DJing — and Jason Thome from Converse. The lineup this year was as brilliant as it was diverse — Curren$y, Hauschka, The Morning Benders, Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, and Those Darlins give you an idea of the musical feast we were treated to, and the friends hanging out in the Ace Palm Springs Texas outpost.

Photos top to bottom: Ace PSP at the Levi’s FADER Fort, Will Bryant customizing Converse for Ace founder Alex Calderwood, Alex with Andrew and Andrew, Alex with Jason Thome of Converse, Levi’s FADER Fort.

February 25th, 2010

During NYC Fashion Week, we gave these Levi’s selvage denim bags to hotel guests, and people who took home vinyl, Wings + Horns robes, flipbooks, Coto ties, or any other treats from the array of Ace wares by the front desk. The bags are a good marriage of the new and old — classic Levi’s and the nascent classic of 29th and Broadway. OMFGCo designed the screenprint for the bags, and cranked them out in their studio with one hand, bottles of malt liquor in the other.

February 17th, 2010

An Opening Ceremony

Saturday night we celebrated the opening of our two new retail spaces, Opening Ceremony and No. 8a, for Fashion Week at Ace Hotel New York. We like having parties as much as we like making hotels, so we had fun with some of the elements for OC’s party. Our design partners, OMFGCo, stamped and grommetted leather press and VIP badges, and silkscreened OC x Levi’s gift bags. OMFGCo shared some pictures of their die-cutting and letterpress process on their blog. The bags contained, among other gifts, the last remaining pairs of of the Conversex Ace NYC collaboration hightops, a reissue of a discontinued, vintage colorway. (You can look for a new collaborations between Ace and Converse soon.)

Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Humberto Leon, and Ryan McGinley, Photos by Hannah Thomson

We also invited a couple of our friends to play the lobby. DJ Nasir from Neverstop, who we’ve known since Ace was just a little 28-room guest housein Seattle, played dance music in the evening, and Stumptown brought Beyondadoubt, one of Portland’s favorite DJs, to play a late night set of 60’s soul 45s.

After a celebration dinner of fried chicken, suckling pig, mashed potatoes and biscuits at the Breslin, OC friends and family watched DJ Solange Knowles take the stage with Dirty Projectors at Liberty Hall.

Upstairs, party-goers perused Phillip Lim eye masks and No. 8a’s anti-souvenirs and Jason Schwarzman got a closer look at the goods.