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Xavier Donnelly designs hospitality interiors by starting with the building, then translating its history into a contemporary experience. His rooms do not follow one repeated signature. A Brooklyn dining room receives Art Nouveau cues, drapery and a 3,000-tile mural; a Hudson Valley restaurant preserves the fabric of a 1782 tavern; a Detroit bar turns automotive memory into a cinematic future. Across those projects, decoration is tied to place and to the practical demands of serving guests.
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That approach explains Donnelly’s growing role at Ash. Architectural Digest reported on March 22, 2023, that he would succeed Will Cooper as the studio’s creative director. In a first-person Magasin Interiors column published March 28, 2025, Donnelly described a remit covering hotels, restaurants, bars and other hospitality spaces. His own test is concise: “The spaces must be thoroughly transporting, yet seamlessly efficient; the design must imbue a space with both character and purpose.”
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Donnelly treats historical reference as a working design material rather than a period costume. He studies what a site already gives him—its architecture, former use, local visual language and physical constraints—then layers in furniture, lighting, textiles, art and custom surfaces. The result can feel nostalgic, but the nostalgia is edited for present-day use.
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His method has four recurring questions:
- What is already there? Vaults, moldings, ovens, proportions and other inherited features establish the room’s identity.
- Which references belong to this place? Art Nouveau, Shaker furniture, Detroit automotive culture and other cues appear because they fit a particular project, not because they form a universal Donnelly look.
- How will people use the room? A restaurant or bar needs circulation, seating, lighting and service to work without interrupting the atmosphere.
- What should guests feel? Donnelly aims for a transporting, almost cinematic setting while keeping the purpose of every element legible.
In a Design Hotels interview, Ash cofounder Ari Heckman described the hotel’s role as a backdrop for life, saying, “Our job is to create this backdrop and make it a place where anything can unfold.” Heckman also said each guest interaction should keep a person “in the scene.” Those comments help explain why Donnelly’s interiors read as complete worlds rather than collections of fashionable objects.
Deux Chats: Art Nouveau atmosphere built from the shell outward
Deux Chats in Brooklyn is the clearest example of Donnelly using a building’s existing character as a starting point. He collaborated with restaurateur Jon Neidich of Golden Age Hospitality on a room with vaulted ceilings and picture-frame molding. Those architectural facts are not background details: they give the dining room a vertical, framed stage on which the rest of the design can operate.
Historical cues and layered materials
The profile in Architectural Digest describes Art Nouveau styling, Thonet-style seating and luxe drapery. Together, those choices create a soft, sinuous counterpoint to the room’s architectural geometry. The seating supplies a historical reference without requiring every surface to look antique, while the curtains add movement, acoustic softness and a sense of occasion.
The most distinctive intervention is a hand-painted tile mural made with painter Violet Oliphant. A separate Architectural Digest feature reports that the commission used 3,000 hand-painted tiles. Because the surface was made for Deux Chats rather than selected from a standard catalog, it acts as a piece of narrative architecture: guests encounter an image and a texture that belong to this restaurant alone.
Why the tile matters functionally
The mural shows how Donnelly joins atmosphere to hospitality use. A large decorative surface can establish a focal point, organize sightlines and give a room a memorable identity without adding freestanding objects that obstruct movement. The tiles also demonstrate his preference for collaboration with artists and artisans, a process he identifies in his 2025 account as part of the work’s practical rhythm.
Deux Chats therefore feels historically informed without becoming a replica of an Art Nouveau interior. The old-world references are selective, and the custom mural makes the room specific to Brooklyn, this building and this restaurant.
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Le Dive: a project whose restraint is part of the evidence
Le Dive, a Manhattan wine bar, is another Donnelly project with Neidich. The available Architectural Digest profile identifies the venue and its hospitality partnership but supplies substantially less information about its materials, palette and architectural interventions than it does for Deux Chats.
That distinction matters. It is possible to place Le Dive in Donnelly’s wider body of hospitality work, but the documented material does not support assigning it a particular historical style, furniture line or decorative motif. For readers comparing projects, Le Dive is best understood as evidence of the range of his commissions rather than as a reason to infer a fixed visual formula.
Stissing House: making a 1782 tavern usable in the present
At Stissing House in the Hudson Valley, Donnelly worked with Clare de Boer’s restaurant inside a tavern dating to 1782. The design brings the building into contemporary use while retaining and emphasizing original features. This is adaptive reuse expressed through hospitality: the past remains visible, but the rooms are organized for current dining.
Preservation as an active design move
The profile singles out a large original bread oven that was converted into a dining nook. Instead of treating the oven as an obstacle or museum artifact, the project gives it a new social function. Guests can occupy a piece of the building’s history, and the feature becomes part of the restaurant’s seating strategy.
Shaker furnishings and sleek lighting sit alongside the preserved fabric. The contrast is deliberate. Shaker references bring a plain, crafted vocabulary, while the lighting introduces a cleaner contemporary line. Neither element overwhelms the tavern; each clarifies how the old structure can support a present-day restaurant.
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The project demonstrates that “historic” does not mean leaving a building untouched. Donnelly keeps the evidence of age that gives the tavern meaning, then inserts furniture and light that make the rooms comfortable and legible for today’s service. The bread oven’s conversion is especially revealing because it joins storytelling and operations in one decision.
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Ash—Bar in Detroit: automotive memory turned into a future-facing scene
Architectural Digest’s August 14, 2023 feature on Ash—Bar describes a different kind of historical remix. Rather than working primarily from an old building’s documented fabric, the project draws on Detroit’s automotive culture and visual history.
The reference system
The bar uses mint-green color, chrome details and dashboard-like wood veneers. A hand-painted panorama inspired by Detroit WPA murals extends the local reference beyond car design into civic art. These elements make the room read as a constructed world, but the sources are recognizable enough to anchor it in Detroit.
Donnelly, identified in the feature as Ash’s creative director at the time, called the result “very cinematic, like you’re in a historic imagining of a restaurant from the future.” The phrase captures the project’s temporal tension: the room imagines a past that never quite existed while using contemporary hospitality design to make that fiction usable.
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Ash—Bar shows that Donnelly’s historical method is not limited to preservation. At Stissing House, the building supplies the memory. At Ash—Bar, regional culture supplies it. The material language is correspondingly more graphic and theatrical—chrome, mint lacquer-like color, veneer and mural—yet the purpose remains the same: create a setting in which guests can eat, drink and move through a coherent story.
Project comparison: one method, different places
| Project | Historical context | Documented references and materials | Hospitality use | Site-specific response |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Deux Chats, Brooklyn | Existing architectural character described through vaulted ceilings and picture-frame molding | Art Nouveau styling, Thonet-style seating, luxe drapery and a 3,000-tile hand-painted mural by Violet Oliphant | Restaurant dining room with a strong visual focal point and layered seating atmosphere | Custom tile narrative and tailored treatment of the Brooklyn room |
| Le Dive, Manhattan | Specific historic context not stated in the available Architectural Digest profile | Specific materials and style not stated in that profile | Wine bar | Documented as a Donnelly project with Jon Neidich; further site response is not established by the cited material |
| Stissing House, Hudson Valley | 1782 tavern retained as the foundation of the project | Original bread oven, Shaker furnishings and sleek lighting | Restaurant with a dining nook formed from the historic oven | Preservation and adaptive reuse make the old tavern serve contemporary dining |
| Ash—Bar, Detroit | Detroit automotive and WPA mural references | Mint-green color, chrome, dashboard-like wood veneers and a hand-painted panorama | Bar designed as a cinematic social setting | Local industrial and civic imagery becomes a “historic imagining” of a future restaurant |
The comparison shows why calling Donnelly’s work simply eclectic misses the organizing principle. The projects share attention to detail and a willingness to build an immersive scene, but their references change with the site. The evidence supports a responsive practice, not a repeatable signature package.
How Donnelly balances fantasy with restaurant and hotel realities
In his March 2025 Magasin Interiors column, Donnelly describes hospitality design as a blend of fantasy and pragmatism. His formulation—transporting yet seamlessly efficient, with character and purpose—sets a higher bar than visual drama alone.
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Atmosphere has to support movement
Each documented project gives an atmospheric device a job in the plan. Deux Chats uses a mural to concentrate attention without filling the floor with objects. Stissing House turns the bread oven into a destination for seating. Ash—Bar uses a coherent visual language to make a social venue feel like a scene rather than a neutral room. These are examples of design elements doing more than decorating a photograph.
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Lighting is part of the emotional choreography
Donnelly’s lighting commentary in a collaborator interview stresses that overhead light can become harsh and unflattering when aimed directly at people. He favors direct light at eye level and says overhead illumination can work when it is soft and diffused. That principle helps explain the role of sleek lighting at Stissing House and the controlled theatricality expected in Ash projects: illumination must reveal faces, food and circulation while preserving the intended mood.
Craft and collaboration are operational choices
Donnelly lists artisans and artists, travel, antiques and furnishings, and drawing and painting among the parts of his process. The Deux Chats mural is a visible result of that collaborative model. Working with makers also lets a project solve a particular visual or spatial problem instead of relying solely on mass-produced components.
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Donnelly’s design language has extended into objects, but the available evidence is narrower than a full retail catalog. Tulip Shades’ collaborator interview describes a first collaboration as a four-shade Xavier Donnelly capsule, including a “Caledonia” print offered in the Gem shape. The interview establishes the collaboration; it does not establish current stock, prices or distribution through any particular marketplace.
Architectural Digest reported in 2023 that Donnelly was developing an independent wallpaper collection for Backdrop. That was a planned collaboration at the time of the report, not confirmation that the collection is currently available. A 2026 Quality Edit profile also identifies a collaboration with Nordic Knots. Neither mention should be read as proof of a current collection, retail inventory or affiliate relationship.
The distinction between a commissioned interior and a consumer product is important. The Deux Chats tiles were made for that restaurant with Violet Oliphant; they are not evidence of a matching retail tile line. Likewise, Thonet-style seating, Shaker furniture, drapery and sleek lighting are documented project references, not endorsements of specific products.
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How to read a Donnelly interior when you visit one
- Look at the inherited structure first. Notice what the building contributes before isolating furniture or color: ceilings, moldings, ovens, windows and proportions.
- Identify the historical source. Ask whether a cue comes from the building, local industry, a design movement or an artistic tradition.
- Trace the guest path. See how focal surfaces, seating and lighting guide arrival, dining, drinking and conversation.
- Separate atmosphere from imitation. A period reference may be simplified, recolored or paired with a modern element rather than reproduced literally.
- Find the functional transformation. The bread oven at Stissing House becoming a dining nook is the clearest example of history acquiring a new use.
This way of looking keeps the interiors from being reduced to a mood-board label such as “vibey.” Their character comes from decisions about evidence, use and sequence: what is preserved, what is invented, and how the two are made to work together.
Donnelly’s role at Ash and the larger hospitality practice
The March 2023 Architectural Digest announcement marked Donnelly’s succession of Will Cooper as Ash creative director. By March 2025, Donnelly’s own account described him leading a team across hotels, restaurants, bars and other hospitality spaces. That broader remit places the individual projects within a continuing studio practice rather than treating them as isolated commissions.
Heckman’s Design Hotels comments provide the companion idea from Ash’s leadership: hotels should be distinct aesthetic worlds, connected by irreverence and attention to detail, while still acting as backdrops for guests’ lives. Donnelly’s projects fit that description because they invite close looking without requiring visitors to understand a design theory before the room works. The historical references create depth; the serviceable layout lets ordinary social life remain central.
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Xavier Donnelly remixes past and present by allowing each hospitality project to establish its own source material. Deux Chats turns Art Nouveau cues and a 3,000-tile mural into a layered Brooklyn dining atmosphere. Stissing House makes a 1782 tavern, including its bread oven, serve a contemporary restaurant. Ash—Bar translates Detroit’s automotive and WPA imagery into a cinematic bar that imagines the future through the past. Le Dive confirms the breadth of his commissions, while the published profile does not provide enough detail to characterize its visual treatment.
The common thread is not a color palette or a signature object. It is a discipline: preserve or identify what makes a place specific, add references that belong to that place, and make every dramatic gesture support the way guests actually use the room.
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