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1Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors2Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute3Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsMargaritaville Resort Times Square creates a resort identity without a beach by stacking the experiences people associate with a vacation—an outdoor pool, multiple restaurants, rooftop and skyline views, and highly visible themed architecture—inside a 32-story urban hotel. The strategy turns a 9,886-square-foot site at Seventh Avenue and 40th Street into a vertical destination rather than imitating a low-rise coastal resort.
Its design was a direct response to the limits of Manhattan real estate. Zoning boundaries, setback and street-wall rules, restrictions on exterior lighting, a former synagogue and design-school building on the site, and pandemic-era construction protocols all shaped the finished project. The result is best understood as an urban-resort experiment documented in a July 20, 2021 profile by Building Design + Construction, not as a current guide to hotel operations or room availability.
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The project behind the resort concept
Margaritaville Hospitality Group and Soho Properties led development of the hotel. Stonehill Taylor designed the building, The McBride Company handled the interiors, and Flintlock Construction Services built it. Stonehill Taylor began design work in 2014; construction started in 2017 and was completed while COVID-19 jobsite protocols were in force.
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Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesFind Drivers →Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →The profile describes a 32-story, 375-foot hotel containing 234 rooms and five restaurants. Those figures describe the project as reported in 2021. They should not be read as a current statement about operating inventory, restaurant schedules or booking availability.
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Paul Taylor, president and founding partner at Stonehill Taylor, summarized the premise this way: We don’t have a beach, but we have Times Square,
he said. The line captures the design argument: the surrounding city is not a deficiency to hide, but the primary landscape that replaces a shoreline.
How the hotel manufactures a resort feeling in a tower
Amenity stacking instead of horizontal sprawl
A conventional beach resort can spread rooms, pools, dining rooms and outdoor recreation across a broad site. This hotel had almost no land for that approach. Its answer was to stack those functions vertically and make each level contribute to a sequence of vacation-like experiences.
- Pool: a heated outdoor pool operates beside Landshark Bar & Grill. The profile presents it as a year-round amenity, a significant change from a seasonal beach setting.
- Food and beverage: five restaurants are distributed through the building. None is on the first floor, an intentional departure from the usual hotel arrangement in which lobby-level dining is the most visible food-and-beverage program.
- Rooftop: the upper levels provide a destination above the street, with city views that substitute for the broad horizon of a coastal resort.
- Guest-room outlooks: several rooms were positioned to look toward the New Year’s Eve ball drop. The view is an event-oriented urban amenity rather than a beach panorama.
- Identity element: a 32-foot Statue of Liberty replica holding a margarita glass gives the property an instantly legible visual marker and ties the resort theme to New York imagery.
These elements work as a program, not as isolated decorations. A guest can move from an elevated room view to rooftop space, then to a pool and bar, while the city remains visible as the setting. The building therefore sells a change of pace without removing visitors from Times Square.
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Views as the substitute for a natural landscape
At a beach resort, the landscape does much of the experiential work. In Times Square, the building has to frame the city deliberately. Rooftop and room views, including sightlines toward the New Year’s Eve ball drop, turn a dense urban scene into an attraction that guests can consume from private and shared spaces.
This approach also changes the meaning of height. The 375-foot tower is not only a way to fit 234 rooms on a small parcel; it is a device for gaining visual distance from the street and creating a sense of escape. The upper floors provide the separation normally supplied by a wide resort site.
Branding through architecture and interiors
The replica Statue of Liberty, oversized at 32 feet and shown holding a margarita glass, makes the theme visible before a guest enters the building. Inside, The McBride Company’s interior role allowed the resort concept to continue through the public areas, restaurants and guest rooms rather than stopping at the façade. The available profile identifies the interiors team and the programmed spaces but does not provide a room-by-room materials schedule or operational description.
What the Manhattan site forced the designers to solve
A 9,886-square-foot parcel across two zoning districts
The hotel occupies a 9,886-square-foot site across two zoning districts. That split affected what could happen on the exterior, including limits on exterior lighting. In a district famous for intense illumination, the restriction created a design problem: the hotel needed a strong public presence while working within rules that constrained how brightly it could address the street.
Rather than treating the parcel as a miniature suburban resort, the team used the tower form to concentrate the program. The building could rise where the site could not spread, preserving room for the pool, restaurants and other destination spaces within a compact footprint.
The five-story stairwell and the street wall
A five-story stairwell helped the project respond to setback and street-wall requirements. This is a practical piece of code-driven architecture: circulation and egress were not hidden as purely technical necessities but became part of the massing strategy that allowed the tower to meet the rules governing its relationship to the street.
The result illustrates a broader urban-resort principle. In a dense city, the feeling of leisure depends on fitting required circulation, structure and zoning setbacks into a sequence of spaces that still feels intentional to a guest. The stairwell is one of the clearest examples of a compliance requirement shaping the visible form.
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Replacing what stood on the property
The site previously held a six-story building that housed the former Parsons School of Design campus and a synagogue. As part of the property acquisition deal, a replacement synagogue was reconstructed on two floors below street level. That arrangement allowed the hotel to occupy the redeveloped parcel while retaining a dedicated religious facility within the project’s overall footprint.
The below-street placement is significant to understanding the project’s density. The hotel was not designed on an empty site with no obligations; it incorporated a replacement use underground while accommodating guest rooms, restaurants, retail and resort amenities above.
How the program differs from a conventional hotel
The profile identifies nearly 5,000 square feet of retail space and 22-foot ground-floor ceilings. Those dimensions give the base a different scale from a standard hotel lobby, even though none of the five restaurants occupies the first floor.
Moving all five restaurants away from the ground floor changes the conventional arrival sequence. Street-level space can focus on retail and a tall, visually open entry condition, while dining becomes a destination guests seek out elsewhere in the tower. In practical terms, the arrangement encourages visitors to explore the building instead of treating the lobby as the entire public experience.
| Project element | Reported detail | Role in the urban-resort strategy |
|---|---|---|
| Site | 9,886 square feet at Seventh Avenue and 40th Street | Requires vertical programming rather than a spread-out resort plan |
| Building | 32 stories and 375 feet | Creates elevation, views and room for stacked amenities |
| Guest rooms | 234 rooms | Combines conventional hotel accommodation with destination public spaces |
| Restaurants | Five; none on the first floor | Distributes food-and-beverage activity through the tower |
| Pool | Heated outdoor pool beside Landshark Bar & Grill | Provides a year-round resort cue in an urban setting |
| Retail | Nearly 5,000 square feet | Activates the base without using the first floor for the restaurants |
| Ground-floor height | 22-foot ceilings | Gives the street-level arrival space a larger civic and commercial scale |
| Signature object | 32-foot Statue of Liberty replica with a margarita glass | Makes the theme and New York setting immediately recognizable |
Urban hotel versus beach resort
The project’s resort claim becomes clearer when the two formats are compared by what they can and cannot use. A beach resort generally relies on horizontal land, a natural shoreline and outdoor circulation. This hotel relies on height, programmed views and carefully placed amenities.
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Outbyte PC Repair FREEClear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsFree Scan →Outbyte Driver Updater FREEScan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →| Axis | Typical beach-resort condition | Times Square approach |
|---|---|---|
| Amenities | Pool, dining and recreation can spread across the grounds | Pool, five restaurants, rooftop space and views are fitted into a 32-story building |
| Form | Mostly horizontal buildings and landscaped outdoor routes | Vertical tower with stacked guest rooms and public destinations |
| Landscape | Beach and open horizon provide the setting | Times Square, skyline views and the New Year’s Eve ball drop provide the setting |
| Site planning | Large parcel with room for separation between uses | 9,886-square-foot parcel constrained by two zoning districts and street-wall rules |
| Lighting | Exterior illumination can be coordinated across a resort campus | Exterior lighting was limited by the site’s zoning conditions |
| Guest experience | Escape comes from distance from a city and access to nature | Escape comes from moving upward, changing scale and consuming the city as a view |
The comparison is about spatial logic, not a claim that the two hotel types provide identical experiences. The Times Square project borrows the recognizable components of a resort and changes the means of delivery.
Construction, coordination and delivery under pandemic restrictions
A long design and construction arc
- 2014: Stonehill Taylor began design work.
- 2017: Construction began.
- 2020–2021 delivery context: The team completed the work while COVID-19 jobsite protocols restricted how construction sites could operate.
The timeline matters because the project combined a tight urban parcel, a tall building, multiple public venues, a replacement synagogue and retail space. Pandemic protocols added another layer of coordination to an already complex construction sequence. The profile identifies the restrictions but does not provide a schedule extension, workforce count or itemized effect on cost.
Multiple stakeholders in one compact footprint
Development, architecture, interiors and construction were assigned to separate lead organizations: Margaritaville Hospitality Group and Soho Properties led development; Stonehill Taylor designed the building; The McBride Company designed interiors; and Flintlock Construction Services built it. The replacement synagogue and the former occupants of the site also made the project more than a standard hotel redevelopment.
On a small parcel, decisions in one layer affect every other layer. A street-wall response affects circulation; below-grade community space affects foundations and services; restaurant locations affect vertical transport; and the pool’s relationship to Landshark Bar & Grill affects structure, waterproofing and guest circulation. The resort concept therefore depended on coordination as much as on branding.
Understanding the two reported cost figures
Building Design + Construction describes the hotel as a $370 million project and separately reports a $98 million construction cost. Those figures refer to different labels in the profile. The source does not reconcile the difference or identify which additional components account for it, so they should not be combined, averaged or presented as interchangeable.
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| Reported figure | How the profile labels it |
|---|---|
| $370 million | Total hotel project |
| $98 million | Construction cost |
For budgeting comparisons, the distinction is essential. A project total can include elements beyond the construction contract, while the construction figure describes the cost category identified by the source. No more specific allocation is established in the profile.
What this 2021 profile establishes—and what it does not
The project profile is strong evidence for the hotel’s design intent, reported dimensions, team, site history and delivery context as of July 2021. It establishes why the property was presented as a vertical resort and how the team used amenities, views and themed architecture to support that positioning.
It does not establish present-day room inventory, nightly rates, restaurant hours, pool access rules, renovation status, booking availability or current operating performance. Those details change over time and require current hotel information. The figures in this article should therefore be read as a documented project snapshot rather than a reservation guide.
Why the Times Square resort model matters to builders
The project demonstrates that a resort is not defined only by a beach, a large site or a low-rise plan. It can also be defined by how a building sequences leisure, food, views and identity. In this case, height supplies distance, the skyline supplies scenery, the pool supplies an outdoor ritual, and the restaurants and rooftop spaces supply reasons to stay inside the property after arriving in Times Square.
For construction and design teams, the more transferable lesson is that constraints can become part of the guest proposition. The two zoning districts, lighting limits, setback requirements, five-story stairwell, below-grade synagogue and compact parcel were not conditions the project could ignore. They became drivers of massing, circulation and programming. The resort feeling emerged from fitting those obligations into a coherent vertical experience.
The Bottom Line
Margaritaville Resort Times Square positions itself as a resort by stacking vacation cues—pool, dining, rooftop space, views and theatrical identity—inside a 32-story tower. Its defining achievement is not reproducing a beach, but converting Times Square’s density and spectacle into the landscape of a vertical urban getaway.
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