The 569-key Millennium Downtown New York, a lower Manhattan fixture across the street from the World Trade Center complex’s famed Oculus transportation hub, is getting a fresh makeover and rebrand as M Social, billed to target the “young at heart.”
The overhaul of the Financial District property includes moving the lobby and check-in area from the ground floor to the third floor, which will feature “a bright, open layout with ample lounge seating, communal tables for working or relaxing, and a pool table,” a spokesperson for Singapore-based Millennium Hotels and Resorts, which owns both its namesake brand and M Social, told CoStar News.
It’s the second M Social for Millennium in New York at a time when downtown Manhattan has transformed from primarily an office hub to an increasingly live, work and play 24/7 domain.
The original lobby space on the ground floor featured "a more traditional layout with a large front desk just off the entryway" and lacked "the natural light and expansive views that the new third-floor location offers," the spokesperson said.
The ground floor of 55 Church St., meanwhile, is being updated to feature the hotel’s food and beverage offerings, including its full-service restaurant, Beast & Butterflies, and a grab-and-go market, the spokesperson said. The project is expected to be completed later this summer.
“A Millennium hotel would have a traditional lobby, a beautiful lobby, and you would go in and check in and go into the room,” Millennium Hotels and Resorts Interim Chief Operating Officer and Chief Commercial Officer Saurabh Prakash said in an interview. With M Social, “what you get is what we call an M Social hub. …There is a lot more interaction. … It's young, it's vibrant, it's colorful.”
The rebrand comes as New York’s hotel market has seen a rebound from the damages of the pandemic. Both the city’s hotel average daily rate and the revenue per available room have hit record highs of $322 and $272 respectively through April, CoStar data shows.
In 2021, Millennium completed the conversion of a Novotel hotel in Times Square to an M Social. The property, at 226 W. 52nd St., has become the hospitality group’s best performing in the city in terms of revenue per available room and other metrics, Prakash said, adding that in other markets globally where it’s made similar conversions, M Social’s performance has topped that of its predecessor hotel.
The decision to rebrand the Financial District location also comes amid changes in lower Manhattan, he said.
“The downtown area is developing … both from a corporate point of view, but also from a leisure point of view,” he told CoStar News. “With all of that development happening in the downtown New York area, we felt M Social was the right brand to come in and really elevate the lifestyle piece in that area.”
In downtown Manhattan, many office properties have been and continue to be converted into residential buildings. It’s also where French luxury retailer Printemps opted to open its U.S. outpost in a property that also houses a Whole Foods and a Life Time luxury gym.
Prakash described M Social’s target consumer as someone of “any generation” but has the “young at heart” mindset.
The downtown M Social is the hospitality group’s eighth such location worldwide since its first location opened in Singapore in 2016, Prakash said, adding that the company is building and opening in the middle of next year a new M Social in Sunnyvale, California, its ninth globally and the third in the United States after the two in Manhattan.
The firm has a global portfolio of about 150 hotels under brands that also include the Biltmore, Studio M, Copthorne and Kingsgate. Some 70 of those are company owned and operated, Prakash said. In Manhattan, it owns four properties, including the Millennium Hotel Broadway Times Square.