Food & Drink
A New Seattle Hotel Sounds Off
The city’s new Sound Hotel offers impressive views and art that impresses
By Samantha Bushman February 28, 2019
Nestled in Belltown adjacent to the iconic Cinerama, the new Sound Hotel stands tall on a sleepy city block that’s been slow to change. The adaptive 42-story part-hotel, part-apartment tower—that bills itself as one of the “first for-rent mixed-use properties in the market”—incorporates unobstructed views of the Space Needle and South Lake Union into some of its 142 hotel rooms, which take up the first 11 floors.
Its name pays homage to the musical history of Belltown while playing up a Puget Sound forest vibe. Music motifs can be found everywhere, from the house restaurant “Currant” Bistro (get it?), to lamps made to look like brass instruments, and unique sound wave wallpaper in each guest room.
On the hotel’s quietest side are eight rooms that face Cinerama’s exterior brick façade. To compete with the sky-high views of the property’s other rooms, the developers commissioned local mural artist Weirdocult Jeff “Weirdo” Jacobson to fill Cinerama’s empty wall with a vibrant, music-themed mural.
Jacobson, who chronicles his installations live on Instagram, is known for what he calls “Post-Internet Hyperrealism,” creating art that combines elements of pop culture, modernism and abstract concepts. His Sound Hotel mural includes a brightly colored guitar and lush green trees streaming with light, offering guests who could have woken up to plain brick wall a window into Belltown’s backyard—a vision of Seattle inspired as much by yesterday as today.
Follow Us
Finding Place in Pictures
Artist Sky Hopinka’s first solo museum exhibit in the northwest showcases his creative approach to language and identity
“I had cassette tapes and workbooks, but it was hard because I was living in Washington, and my tribal language has roots in Wisconsin,” Sky Hopinka says. Learning alone, he could listen to prerecorded Hocak phrases and practice writing letters and words, but an essential component was missing — another person to speak with. Photo
Feeding Ghosts to Free Them
Artist Tessa Hulls creates a revealing graphic novel to help her deal with childhood trauma
Seattle artist Tessa Hulls’ new graphic novel Feeding Ghosts is a deeply stirring narrative of loss, mental illness, and intergenerational trauma. She says that she wrote it to answer this question: What broke my family? Much of the book is about repetition, and how three generations of women in Hulls’ family were emotionally crippled by
