The trendy hotel has 163 rooms and suites and a 3,000-square-foot deck off the dining area.

The Providence Journal / Steve Szydlowski

WARWICK — Business travelers have a new place to stay near T.F. Green Airport starting today as a high-style hotel opens just north of Warwick Mall across Route 5 in the Pontiac Mills complex.

The 163-room NYLO Hotel aims to stand out from the concrete-block and glass-fronted buildings that stretch along Route 2 even as its exterior blends almost seamlessly with the scuffed-up buildings on the remainder of the historic Pontiac Mills site.

The hotel is the second location developed by NYLO Hotels, an Atlanta, Ga., company that concentrates on business travelers who have an affinity for loft-style living popularized by the people who domesticated SoHo, TriBeCa, the meatpacking district and other formerly gritty New York neighborhoods.

“They picked this particular site based on the historic aspect, said Christine Nevers, the hotel’s general manager.

The Pontiac Mills complex, which opened in 1810 and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is north of Route 5 between Knight Street and the Pawtuxet River. In 1863, a Fruit of the Loom factory opened on the site. Operations there ceased in 1970 and, after a period of abandonment, the property was converted in the early 1990s into a retail center for businesses seeking cheap rent, large showrooms and significant storage space.

Since the mid-1990s, the 17.35-acre, 18-building complex changed hands several times among developers hoping to build high-rent office, retail or residential space.

In 2006, the mill owners demolished the section of the mill nearest Route 5 to make room for the NYLO building.

While built in the last 18 months, the brick-and-glass hotel looks as if it were a buffed-up part of the 200-year-old mill, whose other parts stand in varying condition.

“It’s fun to show it off,” said Nevers, as she stood in the hotel lobby overlooking Knight Street. “It’s a very different-looking building.”

The lobby, like other parts of the five-floor hotel, sports polished concrete, inlaid wood and gleaming sections of glass and steel. The lobby furniture is custom designed, with couches made from stacked plywood pieces. There are shelves, stacked with books for the taking by guests.

Just off the lobby is a restaurant, also with custom furnishings including tabletops that have seashells encased in clear plastic and a bar-front covered in burnished metal scales. A wood deck runs from the restaurant’s back to the edge of the Pawtuxet River.

Visitors may eat their meals in The Loft, the hotel’s restaurant, or they can buy “grab-and-go” food there. There is no room service.

The hotel features a full floor of hypo-allergenic rooms and has an agreement with People’s Power & Light to purchase energy credits equivalent to its daily electricity usage.

NYLO has marketing deals with Warwick Mall — within walking distance of the hotel — the nearby Blue Sky Spa Works and Garden City Shopping Center.

“We want to shift some business,” Nevers said. “We’re giving the business traveler that’s already here a choice.”

To draw customers to the hotel, about three miles from the airport, NYLO has embarked on an “aggressive” advertising campaign at the state’s main airfield, she said. The five-year campaign includes ads on message screens and other signs spread throughout Green’s concourse.

“It’s a new concept and we want people to get to know who we are,” she said.

The hotel comes on line as construction in the lodging industry slows after a major boom.

NYLO opened its first hotel, in Plano, Texas, late last year. It broke ground at Pontiac Mills in March of last year and currently has plans for three more sites across the country.

Nationwide, the outlook for the industry has started to sour in the last couple of months.

Hotel occupancy has been hovering around 65 percent, down about 5 percentage points from last year, according to Smith Travel Research.

Nevers said she expects occupancy percentage at NYLO’s Warwick property to range from the “high 50s” to the “lower 60s” this year.

The current downturn in occupancy comes after several years that were good to the hotel industry, according to the New York Times.

Occupancy rates, profit and revenue reached new highs. Last year, the hotel industry in the United States reported record revenue of $138 billion, with profits up 5.3 percent, to $28 billion. As demand grew, hotels began raising room rates. By last year, rates were at record highs, up as much as 7.6 percent over the year before. NYLO rates will be comparable to other business-class hotels near the airport.

The industry now has about 6,000 new hotels, with nearly 800,000 rooms under development, a 27-percent increase from last year, according to Lodging Econometrics, a consulting firm in Portsmouth, N.H. About a third of those hotels are already under construction.

pgrimald@projo.com