The story of the Cooper—Charleston, South Carolina’s first waterfront resort—changed authors a few times before construction challenges led Ben and Kelly Navarro, owners of Beemok Hospitality Collection, to buy and complete it.
The husband-and-wife team behind the city’s acclaimed Sorelle restaurant and the renovation of the iconic Charleston Place sought to rethink a property that was initially slated to be a 4-star hotel. “We wanted to give it an elegance, a personality, and a level of finish,” BHC’s president Casey Lavin says of the 191-key luxury resort, which is complete with infinity pool deck, spa, extensive meeting facilities, and a host of dining options.
“We wanted to transform the way people experience the city. They can stay at this beautiful waterfront resort hotel but walk right into the core of downtown,” Lavin adds, explaining its unique dichotomy of urban hotel and resort.
For the design of the landmark development, BHC enlisted Champalimaud Design to craft the charming guestrooms and public areas. Guests enter at the far end of a C-shaped building, on a lower lobby level set in a calming tone-on-tone palette of honed and chiseled stone raffia and billowing window sheers. From there, they proceed up a spiral staircase that Champalimaud principal Jun Chun says was inspired by the iron gates of Charleston Single homes.
In the guestrooms, an air of calm sophistication and clever planning leaves no trace of the cramped footprints from the original project. “It’s an unpretentious presentation of surfaces and textures and small-scale touches, focusing on utility,” says CEO Ed Bakos, pointing out the shiplap walls, wide plank oak floors, sisal-inspired area rugs, and raffia details in furniture. The bathrooms, meanwhile, feature hand-hewn tile set in a striking French blue coupled with bronze accents.
The meeting spaces carry the same unassuming coastal living scheme and feature sprawling views of the Cooper River.
Meyer Davis was recruited for the design of the Crossing, a 10,000-square-foot multi-room restaurant and bar. “We envisioned various dining rooms so you can have different experiences on different nights,” Gray Davis, cofounder of the New York-based firm, says of the series of spaces that is set along a slick, nautical-blue ceilinged corridor.
Immediately up the same spiral stair that took guests from the motor court, an upper lobby lounge space conjures a luxury yacht, with its polished teak ceilings, stainless steel architectural accents, and furniture swathed in beiges and nautical blues.
The bar and oyster bar sit in the largest room and feature an onyx top that conjures the colors of the Lowcountry marshland. The pièce de résistance at the Crossing is the Captain’s Lounge, which overlooks the Cooper River and showcases custom drapery imprinted with a map of Charleston designed by Lonesome Pictopia. Overhead, a skylight lined with stretched canvas was inspired by an antique yacht.
“We want [the Cooper] to feel effortless, as if you arrived to the waterfront home of a friend,” says Lavin. “We want guests to leave with a deeper appreciation of place—that the hotel feels connected to Charleston and it can’t be interchangeable with anywhere else. There’s a soul, a family behind it.”
