Active Space: The Lobby at the Sheraton Reston Hotel, Virginia

The Sheraton Reston Hotel in Virginia recently underwent a full renovation of its public spaces and guestrooms. Owned by Wurzak Hotel Group and DoveHill Capital Management, the six-floor, horseshoe-shaped hotel combines 302 guestrooms, including 10 suites, with nine meeting rooms, grand ballrooms, and amenities including a new fitness center and Sheraton Club Lounge. Catie Cannon, interior designer with Washington, D.C.-based architecture and design firm //3877, says that the lobby design marries this unique floorplan with Marriott International’s new Sheraton prototype, which favors a vast, open-flow lobby where the bar is a central hub of the space. To adapt the prototype to the Sheraton Reston Hotel’s double-height lobby, a grand staircase leads to the mezzanine level where guests will find the hotel bar. “Because of the shape of the hotel and where all of the meeting rooms are, the lobby very quickly becomes like a pre-function meeting space, so the challenge was making this small area around the reception feel really active,” Cannon explains. “We made sure the walls were open so that some of the sound and activity from the second level floats down into the lobby space and draws guests upwards.” Cannon adds that design elements throughout the hotel highlight the property’s mid-century-influenced architecture while paying homage to Reston’s history as a “new town”—one of the first fully master-planned communities in the country, developed to connect residential and commercial areas via shared green spaces and park systems. Drawing inspiration from this history, the lobby is a public space connecting the different guestroom and meeting areas of the hotel—a communal hub where mid-century style and multi-use seating allows guests to work, relax, and socialize.