The air is crisp on Saturday afternoons in Fayetteville, and the town is swarmed with crimson-clad University of Arkansas football fans who mill about hotel lobbies and local restaurants before and after the games. Their red sweaters and jackets will look a little better at The Stonebreaker Hotel, located a short walk from Razorback Stadium. That is because Austin-based FÖDA designed the interiors to coordinate with Arkansas’s team colors.
The main color is Cardinal Red #9D2235, and the designers were hesitant to use it directly. Rather, they pinned it up to act as “the ghost in the machine,” as they described it, as they worked out the color palette. The strategy of the Stonebreaker design is to find opportunity in the existing and bring it to life with minimal intervention. “The football fans become these free bursts of colors,” FÖDA director of interiors Stephanie Leung told AN. “It’s like performance art.”
This is just one of many clever yet minimal interventions that brought to life the 78-room hotel, which includes a restaurant, bar, and members club in a renovated Victorian house. A barn on the property that had housed Highland cattle is now an event space, while a new hotel building, a pool, walking paths, and landscaped gardens complete the grounds. FÖDA also completed the naming, branding, market research, graphic design, art program, and interior design for the entire project.
Renovating the House
The house is the center of the project. Originally built in the 1800s, it had been subjected to many additions and renovations. “Stylistically, it was a hot mess,” said Jett Butler, founder and chief creative officer of FÖDA. The manor house was a simple Arkansas Victorian farmhouse from the late 1800s with vague Arts and Crafts and revivalist additions. The pièce de résistance of this hodgepodge was several tons of Carrara marble that had somehow been hoisted into the upstairs master suite.
FÖDA’s strategy was to lean into the house’s quirks. “How do you bridge these stylistically different parts without remaking it all?” Butler said. “We can’t afford to fix it, so let’s double down on the eclecticism.”
Rather than do an extensive renovation, FÖDA added subtle changes, leaving historical details like the pitched roofs and trellises. “We wanted to capture the history of the house and honor the past,” Leung said. “There were a lot of stories to tell with design decisions as well as with the art and branding.”
They first set out to change the circulation in the house and orient its entrances for their respective uses: Hotel guests enter from the west and restaurant patrons from the east. There were small opportunities to carve into the building, and the designers divided the house into zones, each with a distinct material and color palette: gold for the main entry, muted grays and creams in hallways, olive green in the lounge, cobalt blue in the Chess Room. “Different hues are exposed as you move through the space,” Leung said. “There are moments of surprise in each room.”
To deliver the look of a four- or five-star hotel with a three-star budget, design decisions had to be precise. Existing cabinetry was repainted and other details in the house lean into maximalism and folk art, connecting to the local traditions of craft and woodworking. Working with Kansas City–based Hufft, FÖDA designed custom millwork that is etched with 80 different patterns, including some from the Indigenous Osage Nation. These boards were used to wrap columns and adorn door casings with the history of the place.
An “Exercise in Trust”
FÖDA took a different approach to the design process at Stonebreaker, as its client was willing to take unusual risks. For example, FÖDA was able to acquire furniture and track the budget on the fly, rather than buying it all at once. “A lot of money is wasted in risk management and middlemen,” Butler said.
An unusual collaboration was with the general contractor, which FÖDA challenged to find moldings from wherever it could and bring them to the Stonebreaker, where they were installed without any strict plan. “We just gave them one rule, which was to not repeat a molding profile,” Leung explained. “We had a ton of different moldings.”
In the private dining room, Leung and her team painted wall-sized flora such as vines and blossoms, giving occasional organic bursts of color. These details are a lesson in taking chances rather than being bureaucratic about design approvals, especially on low-risk features like painted surfaces. “The client gave us some freedom to play in real time, in situ,” Leung said. “It was a great exercise in trust.”
Striving for Organic Cohesion
While the strategy for the house was to create difference, leaning into a sort of eclecticism, the overall site strategy aimed to conjure cohesion between old and new—connected by a landscaped garden in the center. The barn was repainted and will host revenue-generating events such as corporate dinners and weddings. A 78-room hotel building was added. This addition is clad in metal panels, with cuts into its massing to create covered exterior spaces, which are clad in wood.
Inside, rooms are compact spaces based on hotels like citizenM or New York’s Public Hotel, which have very efficient layouts. This increased the number of rentable rooms to ensure the business plan would work. Within a single module, the bathroom is clad in one colorway of tile. The shower and commode are a different color behind a sheet of glass.
The sleeping area is another hue and contains a bed, chair, and built-in bench that creates a calm sitting area by the window. “The compression of space allowed us to use better materials than the budget might otherwise have allowed,” Butler said.
Furniture, Art, and Graphics
In addition to the custom furniture and bedding, the furniture, fixtures, and equipment budget included art and decorative objects. In the house, the team used vintage pieces or things they could easily customize to make the rooms feel unique.
As a full-service design studio, FÖDA completed all of the furniture, art, and branding for Stonebreaker. This included uniforms, menus, and signage. FÖDA used graphics to add a layer to the architectural vocabulary with a cohesive branding and marketing strategy. A faceted and chunky typeface is meant to feel contemporary, but at second glance, it has complexity, much like the house’s architecture. Stonebreaker’s wordmark is a sassafras leaf, a nod to the trees on the site and its history as Sassafras Hill before the Markham family bought it. The name itself comes from the roots of the sassafras tree, which are known to break rocks. “The Stonebreaker is about narrative,” Butler said. “Each element helps tell these stories in a simple and honest way.”
Matt Shaw is a New York–based architecture author, editor, and curator and a former executive editor of AN.
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