With a View of the Dollar

Giant scrapers last week clawed at a Los Angeles hilltop where a 500-room Sheraton hotel will soon rise. Half a world away, turbaned Moslems naked to the waist poured concrete foundations for Intercontinental Hotels in Lahore and Rawalpindi, Pakistan. In St. Paul, the framework for a 24-story Hilton climbed skyward, while in New Haven, Conn., and Montreal, workmen were busy building locally financed hotels. These far-flung structures are the creations of one architect: balding, cherubic William Benjamin Tabler, 50, who has become the world's busiest designer of big hotels, including the new Hiltons in Manhattan, San Fran cisco and Washington.

Jetting through a hotel construction boom that has spread to most parts of the earth, Tabler has designed 35 hotels that cost $314 million, has 49 more projects abuilding or on the drawing boards in his penthouse office in Manhattan's Statler Hilton. Having signed up last month to design another $50 million worth, he flew off last week on an eleven-day inspection of work in progress in Los Angeles, London, Nairobi and Johannesburg.

Smaller Bathrooms. The world's major innkeepers knock on Tabler's door because he has developed a McNamaralike precision for slashing frills and space out of his buildings to make them cheaper to construct and operate. At Denver's Brown Palace annex, he eliminated 100 light fixtures (at $50 each) by doing away with the "up" and "down" elevator signal lights in the hallways; instead, he placed the lights just inside the elevator cars, where they show as the doors open. By installing towel hooks next to the wash basins, he encouraged customers to make do with one towel (instead of the usual four), thus has saved $7,000 a year for the Hartford Statler. The Tabler-designed combination basin and vanity table has become a standard item in many hotels, helped to reduce the size of the average bathroom by 10% .

Using mock-up rooms, he has figured out how small a room can shrink be fore customers will rebel (in low-rate hotels, it can be 71 ft. by 10 ft.). At the New York Hilton, he fitted out a service elevator as a speedy, efficient pantry for Continental breakfasts: one man, instead of the usual three, takes an order on the telephone, warms rolls and pours coffee while the elevator moves, then delivers it to the proper floor. Another Tabler innovation: a strip of black paint in place of black tile on the bottom of closets (saving: $7,000).

Work at Play. Few Tabler hotels win design prizes; but the architect is proud that no hotel of his has lost money, even though hotel wages have climbed 32% in the last ten years, while room rates are up only 21%. He has calculated the profit on every cubic foot of hotel space, figures that profits run to 70% on the price of rooms, 50% on liquor service, nothing at all on food--and that lobbies are just so much dead space. Tabler hotels have small lobbies, plenty of bedrooms. Says he: "Bedrooms are the cheapest thing in a hotel to build, and they produce all the profit. We cut down on the things that lose money."

Illinois-born Bill Tabler learned his architecture at Harvard. He telescoped nine years of study into seven by taking extra classes, earned a bachelor's degree in engineering at Harvard College ('36), then added a master's in architecture at Harvard's Graduate School of Design ('39). Squeezing the most out of his time, he sleeps about one night a week on planes while traveling 300,000 miles a year. Even office parties do double duty: before the annual banquet for his 50-man staff and their wives--at a Tabler-designed hotel--there is always a tour from boilers to bedrooms, and a Tabler lecture on hotel techniques.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.