MARKZEFF has been tapped to design the flagship Virgin Hotel that will be located in NoMad, the hottest new area for residential real estate, design and restaurants in New York City. This highly anticipated property includes 450 guest-rooms with three floors of pool and restaurant space. The design firm will also be designing the 240-room Virgin Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee on Music Row, which takes inspiration from the music scene.

MARKZEFF has successfully collaborated with Kimpton Hotel & Restaurant Group (KHRG) on several projects including Hotel Van Zandt in Austin, Texas, where the firm infused new energy into the Rainey Street Historic District with a 16-story hotel with 319 guest rooms, multiple restaurants, and a live music venue. MARKZEFF’s team turned to Austin’s music scene to form the baseline for the hotel by paying homage to folk music legend, Townes Van Zandt. This influence can be seen in the lobby lounge’s installation of birds, made from vinyl records, to curated collections of found objects such as vintage radios and microphones, to the varying shades of blue found throughout the hotel as Townes’ final album, No Deeper Blue symbolically plays. To keep the hotel from being one-note, Zeff invented a fresh design style, “elegant cowboy grunge”—western motifs with a modern twist.

The firm also developed The Commoner restaurant and bar in the Hotel Monaco in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for KHRG, where MARKZEFF looked to the historic building in which it is housed and to the heritage of the city to inform the design. MARKZEFF also created the signature restaurant Ave and the casual beach bar Coccoloba, the new Seafire resort in the Cayman Islands. The scope of the work at the island retreat included everything from the brand development, name and concept of the food and beverage facilities to envisioning and implementing innovative interior design. Additionally, MARKZEFF will collaborate with KHRG on the design of a new hotel property in Seattle, Washington.

MARKZEFF is also involved in the development of several hospitality projects to be completed starting in 2017 well into the next few years including the complete renovation and redesign of Joie de Vivre’s Hotel Kabuki, with the addition of a new restaurant, in San Francisco, California, the design of the interiors for the Mountain Shadows Resort in Paradise Valley, Arizona, and at the Supernatural Hotel in Amsterdam. The firm has partnered with Hilton Worldwide, globally, to conceive and design the hospitality giant’s new lifestyle brand, Canopy, with the first hotels opening in San Antonio, Rockville, New Orleans, Ithaca, and Portland. Further, MARKZEFF will bring the first six-star hotel to the East Coast of North America with the renovation of the Adelphi Hotel in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Previous hospitality projects include Hampshire Group’s Dream and Night Hotel both located in New York City as well as their private fleet of luxury yachts called Fathom. Following the success of these projects, the design firm was hired to take on a two million square foot hotel development of the Hard Rock Hotel brand for the Morgan’s Group in Las Vegas, Nevada.

MARKZEFF first ventured into hospitality by working with New York City-based restaurateur Jimmy Bradley of DLA Restaurants in 1998. Today, The Red Cat still enjoys a stellar reputation for its culinary delights and the enchanting ambiance.