West Elm gets more elbow room at Industry City

Home furnishings chain West Elm has taken another 40,000 square feet at Industry City as a staging ground to help launch its new hotel concept.

The Dumbo-based company has leased space at Industry City for warehousing and storage for several years, and this new deal pushes its footprint up to more than 100,000 square feet, Crain’s reported.

Industry City asking rents range from between $25 and $35 per square foot.

West Elm recently added a photography studio and workshop at the Sunset Park complex, and the new space will allow it to build mock-up guest rooms and common areas for the hotel brand it’s launching with the hospitality management and development firm DDK.

The furniture designer announced last week it was launching the hotel concept in Savannah, Charlotte, Detroit, Minneapolis and Indianapolis as well as other locations, but declined to say whether it would open a hotel in New York.

“West Elm is representative of the change that is happening at Industry City,” Industry City CEO Andrew Kimball said. “It’s gone from a place that was once used for storage and had no jobs to a really dynamic ecosystem of tenants in the city’s innovation economy.”

Advertising giant Publicis Group inked a deal earlier this year to open its first Brooklyn location at the 6-million-square-foot complex, a joint venture among Jamestown [TRDataCustom], Belvedere Capital and Angelo, Gordon & Co. [Crain’s] – Rich Bockmann