Spotlight: The Marker Hotel's Focus on Sustainability
SF Climate Week is proud to announce that it is partnering with The Marker San Francisco, one of the city’s leaders in sustainable hospitality. The historic Beaux Arts hotel in downtown San Francisco is donating proceeds from reservations in its 208 rooms and 12,000 square feet of meeting space to support SF Climate Week.
Last year, The Marker received the California Green Lodging program’s “Leadership” certificate, a months-long compliance process that recognizes sustainable practices in water and energy conservation, waste minimization, recycling, environmentally friendly purchasing, program sustainability, and pollution prevention in California hotels.
We sat down with Managing Director Brian Fenwick to discuss how The Marker became a leader in green hospitality as part of a greater effort to breathe new life into downtown.
Fenwick said that his inspiration came from seeing decades of greenwashing in the hotel industry. Fenwick says he wanted to take a new approach with The Marker that would set an example for the industry.
“I love adapt-and-reuse projects. New builds are great, but new builds are damaging to the environment in many ways. No matter how environmentally friendly they're built, it is still destroying something else and then using resources to build something new.”
The Marker’s sustainability story started with the renovation of a historic Beaux Arts hotel just off of Union Square, originally built in 1910. Over the last six months, The Marker’s staff developed a top-to-bottom environmental review process for everything that goes into its amenities, finding the most efficient options for everything from machines to laundry services, all the way down to the energy efficient printers.
“We have gone to our laundry service four times in the last year just for quality checks. We walked through the facility and we ensured that they're using recycled water practices,” Fenwick says.
Building efficiency is sure to be an important topic at SF Climate Week, and many of those climate tech solutions are built into The Marker’s new design. All 208 of The Marker’s rooms have been retrofitted with efficient double-pane windows designed to optimize heat that comes in from the sun in the day. They also installed a state-of-the-art HVAC system complete with temperature sensors in each room to fully optimize heat demand and reduce energy consumption.
Waste also represents a significant environmental footprint for the hospitality industry. Fenwick says The Marker has reduced plastic waste to all but the essentials, including a partnership with Path Water to supply each room with aluminum water bottles that can be refilled at FloWater chilled filtered water stations throughout the hotel.
“Even though San Francisco separates waste, we take that to the next level with regard to separation of cans and bottles and putting those out to the side and making sure organic waste is accurate and correct.”
At the time of the hotel’s original opening in 1910, San Francisco was undergoing an architectural renewal in the wake of the 1906 earthquake and fire. Fast forward to today, and The Marker is carrying that spirit of renewal into the present to breathe new life into Union Square with a space built to adapt and thrive into the future.
Guests are greeted in the front archway by a bloom of grape vines, white cherry blossoms in bougainvillea from across Northern California, supplied by local florists participating in the Union Square in Bloom initiative to beautify downtown San Francisco. And just in time for SF Climate Week, The Marker’s partner restaurant, Tratto, will introduce a sustainable menu using locally-sourced ingredients selected for minimal environmental impact.
Staying at The Marker during SF Climate Week means being in the heart of the action while endorsing sustainable lodging. Book your stay at The Marker Hotel using the code SFCLIMATEWEEK, and they will donate a portion of your stay to support SF Climate Week.
