At Beverly Plaza, ‘Clean Room’ Has a New Meaning : Environment: The hotel has jumped on the environmental marketing bandwagon, hiring a consultant on indoor pollution to correct any hazards in its lodgings.

Some hotels put a mint on your pillow.

Others peddle the fact that they won’t put one there.

Now one promises that your pillow and your room won’t make you sick. Behold the first “environmentally conditioned” hotel.

The Beverly Plaza, a medium-priced corporate hostel near the Beverly Center in Los Angeles, has vaulted aboard the environmental marketing bandwagon and hired a consultant on indoor pollution to correct hazards in its rooms. It may start with a smoking ban in its 98-room building.

Until now, most hotel managers who were worried enough about indoor environmental quality to order surveys and repairs have kept such concerns to themselves.

But Beverly Plaza’s consultant and owners take pains to point out that they have acted without being prodded by complaints of illness from what has come to be known as “sick building syndrome.”

Kenneth Pressberg, one of the owners, said his interest in indoor pollution arises from personal experience--elsewhere. Pressberg became ill several years ago when overseeing improvements in an office building he owned.

“After about nine months of going through brain scans and everything coming out ‘perfect health,’ ” he recalled, a doctor traced his lightheadedness and flu-like symptoms to the material in a new carpet being installed in the building. A self-described “health nut,” he became a believer in the hazards of indoor pollution.

Pressberg said he has not decided in what ways the 6-year-old hotel will promote its environmental credentials.

Sick building syndrome, which became an environmental concern as buildings adopted such energy-efficient features as windows that don’t open, is used to describe indoor conditions in which carpets, furniture, air-conditioning ducting, heating systems and other design elements cause illness either in ordinary or allergic people.

An early and extreme example of a sick building developed in 1976 at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia, where guests at an American Legion convention developed what came to be named Legionnaires’ disease. The illness struck more than 150 people, 29 of whom died.

Larry Foster, president of Atlanta-based Environmental Control Systems Inc., consultant to the Beverly Plaza, charges $1 to $2 a square foot for the firm’s services. This includes evaluating the premises, fixing any problems and monitoring the results.

“We’re getting (the hotel) into the modern state of the art of vacuuming technology,” said Foster by way of example.

“Of course, you can see the sales potential from the hotel’s point of view,” said Simon Turner of Healthy Buildings International, a Fairfax, Va.-based firm that has assessed indoor pollution problems at 412 major buildings since 1981. But so far, Turner has more often seen owners of office buildings who are particularly sensitive to long-term renters’ worries use environmental monitoring in their marketing.

“What we find,” Turner said, “is that they like to have a company routinely come in every six months to check the building. And then they advertise that.”

Sheila O’Brien, public relations director for the swankier Beverly Hills Hotel up the road, asked: “If there’s nothing to be taken care of, why are they are cleaning it up? What are they looking for?”

O’Brien noted that at the Beverly Hills Hotel, all doors and windows open onto 11 acres of gardens.

“Where rooms are open,” countered consultant Foster, “there can be pollens, auto exhaust. . . . When we’re done with the Beverly Plaza, it’s going to be cleaner than a hospital operating room.”