Hudson, New York's largest landmarked building sat idle for decades before Charlap Hyman & Herrero transformed the 1883 pocketbook factory into Pocketbook Hudson, opening in 2025 as a 46-room boutique hotel that gives the city's industrial past an unexpectedly sensuous second life. The architects — recipients of the 2026 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Interior Design — chose to work with the building's bones rather than smooth them away. Across 70,000 square feet of red brick and heavy timber, the arched factory windows remain oversized and unapologetic, flooding guest rooms with the kind of raking northern light that mills were originally engineered to capture. The interiors hold the friction between rough and refined with real confidence. Exposed brick walls, their surface stripped back to a pale, chalky warmth, surround low platform beds in natural maple with integrated millwork benches that read as site-specific furniture. In the restaurant, original timber posts and white-painted steel ductwork coexist with black lacquer banquettes and stainless steel open-kitchen shelving, the whole room grounded by wide-plank reclaimed floors worn to a silver-brown patina. The spa pool, set inside what appears to be an undressed boiler room or storage vault, is perhaps the most striking space: raw concrete surrounds a luminous green pool beneath high brick walls, a single amber resin object placed poolside as both furniture and sculpture. Nothing here has been overcorrected.

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