Alex Yates
Creative Director
May Doan
Account Manager
Hoang Anh Nguyen
Junior Account Manager
Quynh Anh Pham
Producer
Viet Ngo
Photographer
Background
Inspired by New York in the 1920’s, The Hudson Rooms transports its guests to a golden, bygone era. But you don’t need a degree in art history to appreciate the Art Deco interiors, or to be a cocktail expert to enjoy the authentic yet accessible drinks menu. With a design based on Grand Central Station, The Hudson Rooms is high concept yet welcoming, bringing together vaulted ceilings with expansive outdoor views, and delivering fresh seafood from as far away as France and Canada, just in time for dinner.
Fourdozen began working with The Hudson Rooms as part of its support for Capella Hanoi, in an effort to make The Hudson Rooms the gathering place for locals and expatriates alike. Just as Grand Central was a crossroads for people on the move, The Hudson Rooms is where people going somewhere in Vietnam come to rub shoulders.
Our Big Idea
At Fourdozen, our approach always starts with storytelling. This makes our collaboration with The Hudson Rooms an ideal match, because the team at Capella have designed a space that has storytelling embedded into every arch, every staff uniform, and every page of the menu. It is a story larger than any single restaurant or bar—one that centers the guests as the principal characters. We put together a strategy that positioned The Hudson Rooms as something big: as a milestone, as evidence of Hanoi’s increasing cosmopolitan sophistication, and a driver of it, too.
We bring this story to life through brand activation, content creation, and sustained public relations activities. Our campaign, Meet me at The Hudson Rooms, treats this rooftop bar and restaurant as a city-wide gathering point. Grand Central Station, the Fulton Fish Market and New York in the roaring 20’s provide rich raw material for our content writing and media creation, which we supplement with archival photography to bring the brand to technicolor life online. But even though The Hudson Rooms takes its inspiration from the past, it is also the exact right bar for our current moment.
This is a story about Hanoi, too. Our city is experiencing its own roaring 20s, with all the optimism that brings. The Hudson Rooms therefore not only stands for one of the most vibrant times in New York, it also represents the economic and cultural flourishing of Hanoi, during a different ‘20s (the 2020s). By connecting modern Hanoi with the distant American past we create a thread that is too irresistible not to pull on.
