Designed in 2009. Asked by the Morgans Hotel Group to develop an in-room decorative installation and a promotional mailer for the Ames Hotel in Boston, I wanted to develop a project that would tie together the historical provenance of the Ames building, its sleek new interior, and the city of Boston. I was looking for something that would respond to the hotel’s “Benjamin Franklin meets supermodel” motto. The idea of the souvenir plate in particular, struck me as fertile ground. The team liked the idea. After much exploration I chose to use an image of the exterior of the Ames building printed in metallic gold, a current map of Boston that has been manipulated to give it a more historic feel, a 19th century image of a codfish – historically important to the New England economy, and text from a historical account of a ship arriving in Boston Harbor from the book Picturesque America from 1874.
