Old or new, classic or forward-thinking, New York hotels pulse with life. Fast service and swish rooms entice guests at first, but it’s the subtle eccentricities that keep them returning again and again. Perhaps the hotel has peculiar architecture that once pioneered a movement, an extravagant ambience inspired by its flashy former owner, or maybe even something as simple as a charming collection of books. One thing’s for sure, the addresses below each provide their own delightful dose of escapism in the metropolis.
Honour roll
With its florid cast-iron balconies, this red-brick 12-storey Victorian behemoth on West 23rd Street was the tallest building in New York when it opened in 1884. By the 1950s it had gained notoriety as a shabby bohemian sanctuary for impoverished and occasionally self-destructive writers, painters, actors, rock and rollers, junkies, hookers and ghosts who declined to check out. The colourful legend endures, but after 11 years of litigation and renovations the Manhattan icon has reopened, improbably, as a luxury hotel.
Mercifully, the Chelsea, as it is known, has lost none of its louche allure. The hotel’s expansive public spaces, 125 guest rooms and 30 hotel suite apartments have been redesigned by the current owners, Sean MacPherson, Ira Drukier and Richard Born, a trio whose previous hip hotel projects in Manhattan include the Jane, the Bowery and the Maritime. ‘Ultimately we were seduced by the romance of the building and we wanted to restore it, not destroy it,’ says MacPherson, the group’s photogenic 50-something front man, who has retained the boyish good looks and breezy air of the Californian surfer he once was.
Read more about our visit to The Hotel Chelsea here.
It’s rare that Brutalist architecture evokes the warmth of home, but Hannes Peer, lead architect at the Manner, somehow makes the connection feel natural – and it’s all carried off with tremendous panache. Take the chandeliers, which Peer himself custom-made by casting polished steel in glass. These long, dangling tubes are peculiar even before the bulbs have been switched on, but there’s a comforting synergy in finding them floating above every dining table and leather sofa. The Manner isn’t afraid of a little empty space – the brazen colours and fabrics are thrilling enough to handle that – but the artworks that do appear are never mere embellishments, but placed with purpose. Note Danish sculptor Nicholas Shurey’s blobby pair of three-metre-tall totems, and Italian artist Giovanni de Francesco’s craggy ceramic wall art in the lobby. Spanish architect Elvira Solana vividly reinterprets the Renaissance for the ground-floor restaurant’s Otter mural, while local New Yorker Alex Proba paints the corridor ceilings in warm and fuzzy hues. With clutter removed, there’s an intimacy fostered in the pieces left behind, and the hotel maps out an intentional journey for guests, with humanity at its core. The absence of televisions in rooms is a bold gambit to remove modern distractions, but it’s just one of the gentle touches that adjust the manner – if you’ll excuse the pun – in which hotels deserve to be enjoyed.
Name a hotel more fabled than the Plaza… I’ll wait. Think of the Oak Bar that witnessed spies abducting Hollywood heart-throb Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. The decadent, but crucially very hot, parlour suite that sparked a climactic confrontation in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The grand lobby we stumble on each festive season alongside our dear friend Kevin McCallister, who finds himself once again ‘lost in New York’. And the legends go far beyond the pages of novels and the silver screen. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright lived in Suite 223–225 for six years while constructing the Guggenheim Museum, and when Beatlemania finally landed in the USA, the Plaza was the first stop on their whirlwind tour. Since its opening in 1907, the hotel has seen everything from White House weddings to pivotal feminist protests, not to mention one extraordinary masquerade ball. Host Truman Capote drew the likes of Frank Sinatra, Rose Kennedy and Andy Warhol into its clandestine ballroom for what became known as the ‘party of the century’. If walls could talk, the Plaza is undoubtedly where we’d want to be listening.
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When designing a home for the National Maritime Union in 1968, Albert Ledner adopted a rather literal approach. He erected what might be better described as a ship docked on land: a narrow, white-tiled slab with perfectly symmetrical rows of porthole windows. It’s a look that requires mulling over, one that was and always will be divisive. But for all its rebellion against convention, the building became a Modernist landmark in New York, and when the Union moved out, the nautical theme endured when the Maritime Hotel took over. The lobby sets the tone. Armchairs and coffee tables seem to drift upon its vast, royal blue rug, while the slatted oak ceilings are reminiscent of boat decking. The crown jewel, however, is the mural suspended above the check-in desk, where scenes of seafaring swirl. Guest rooms are far more spacious and sophisticated than cabins, but their imposing, round windows transport you to the ocean nonetheless.
It’s hard to picture a time where New York wasn’t overrun with lustrous skyscrapers, but all big things come from (comparatively) small beginnings. In 1883, a crimson, turreted edifice, then known as Temple Court, rose nine storeys high on 5 Beekman Street and set the standard for towering office spaces in the city. The façade enticed businesses with its tremendous scale, but it was the spellbinding interior that convinced them to stay – a soaring Victorian atrium topped with a gleaming pyramidal skylight. Over a century may have passed, not to mention decades of abandonment, but the atrium lives on in all its glory, and now swaps stern-faced business personnel for a flurry of globetrotters. Guests of the Beekman Hotel revel in its velvety bar room positioned at the atrium’s base and moodily lit by hazy rays from far above, while nine levels of bedrooms cascade upwards. A myriad of bespoke artworks are dispersed across each floor by curator Katherine Gass, from Katerina Lanfranco’s delicately handblown glass sculptures to Jane Hammond’s thrillingly hand-drawn maps.
There are two sides to the Fifth Avenue hotel: the Mansion and the Tower. The former, a Renaissance-style palazzo constructed in 1907, was joined by a 29-storey glass tower in 2023 to form the hotel. But before both halves of the unlikely pair were erected, the site belonged to one Charlotte Goodridge, a legendary Gilded Age hostess famed for her extravagant receptions. It’s the legacy of this exuberant life, the beguiling glamour, that governs the hotel today.
Designer Martin Brudnizki chose fanciful shades of green, yellow and pink for the guest rooms, where classic furniture is jumbled together with Murano glass chandeliers and Chinese-inspired wardrobes. Even the lobby is wrapped in reverie. Light shimmers from white marble floors and mirror-panelled walls to antique cabinets stuffed with crystal sculptures, while the desk lies on the golden backdrop of Bugz and Drugs, artist Pae White’s tapestry inspired by nature’s most curious creations. And yet the true diamonds among this glittering display are the flea-market finds and travel mementos that tell a thousand stories.
Hidden gems
Nine Orchard hotel is housed in a Lower East Side landmark, the Jarmulowsky Bank, at the corner of Canal and Orchard streets, which is arguably one of the city’s buzziest areas. The hotel opened in June 2022, after a painstaking restoration that gave new life to the 1912 Beaux-Arts building. The developers retained the mouldings and large windows and, using old photographs, recreated the original clock in the front and the Neoclassical round ‘tempietto’ on the rooftop. The lobby occupies what was the main banking hall, and it has been dressed with chic mid-20th-century Swedish benches, low tables and armchairs, all cosied up with a maximalist Gucci wallpaper. The Swan Room next door has grand arched windows and a restored ornamental ceiling that recalls New York’s Grand Central station. The retro Corner Bar features charming hand-painted details by Happy Menocal Studio. I loved visiting the East Room, a private dining room on the second floor, with an imposing teal-tiled mantelpiece and banquet-style sofas covered in Colony’s ‘Marly’ fabrics, one of my all-time favourites. And I was impressed by the large paintings on the walls, apparently found by Fernando Santangelo at a flea market.
Read more about Gianluca Longo’s visit to Nine Orchard here.
Only three years have passed since the Twenty Two conquered London’s hotel scene, but the owners of this plush Mayfair hideaway have already taken a well-trodden path, crossing the pond and attempting to break America. A ravishing newcomer on the block, the Twenty Two New York opened its doors in February 2025 and gracefully replicated the old-world charm of its London original. Yet this US outpost refuses to be a mere ‘sister hotel’, offering the same soothing atmosphere of its predecessor with over double the rooms. It opts for a rich but refined look rather than maximalist splendour. The building itself was once the Margaret Louisa Home, a refuge for independent women in the 19th century named after its philanthropic heiress. Child Studio, the creatives tasked with reviving the space, used archival museum photographs of this past life to inspire the hotel’s design, reinterpreting the American vernacular style. The Twenty Two feels like a proud New Yorker, rippling with ambition, reinvention and the belief that anything is possible.
Read more about The Twenty Two New York here.
Like all the cosiest reading nooks, Library Hotel is wonderfully inconspicuous. Just a block away from the New York Public Library, the address appears to be a regular hotel – that is, until you discover a hoard of about 100 books in your bedroom. Over 6,000 hardcover editions lie across the hotel’s ten floors, smartly organised to resemble the reading rooms of an actual library. Each floor honours a different Dewey Decimal category, like technology or the arts and, in turn, each room homes in on a niche. The love room is a favourite with honeymooners, who gleefully flick through pages on amorous philosophy, while the books in the fashion-design room were specially chosen by honorary librarian Vera Wang. Then there’s the libraries room, which feels delightfully self-indulgent, while one can only imagine the oddities contained within the paranormal room. Perhaps most revealing of all, Neil Armstrong, a frequent visitor, preferred biography to astronomy. There’s something irresistible about a private collection, and the thrill of picking up your room keys to find a treasure trove of literature on fairy tales or psychology, dinosaurs or Asian history is sure to unearth a bookish curiosity in us all.
How do you stand out in the overcrowded landscape of New York hotels? Paint the front turquoise and add a sunshine yellow rooftop for good measure, Tim and Kit Kemp might say. The couple are no strangers to a flamboyant palette inside, but for the Warren Street Hotel, they went one step further by applying it to the exterior as well. The address is the latest addition to the Kemps’ hospitality empire, and it’s a family affair as always, with the creative direction shared by Kit and her two daughters, Minnie and Willow. All 69 rooms and suites assemble distinctive compositions of colour, pattern and texture, while some fabrics are even crafted by Kit herself in collaboration with London-based houses Christopher Farr Cloth and GP&J Baker. Thoughtful design touches reach other areas of the hotel too, like the restaurant dishes served on Kit’s whimsical range of Spode china, or the evocative sculptures by Tony Cragg and Wendell Castle that greet you in the lobby and bar.
Sometimes less is more, and Now Now takes inspiration from the innovative capsule hotels in Japan for its sleeper cabin concept. A sanctuary for solo travellers, each room fits only a single bed within its three-square-metre perimeter. Working with such a miniature space is a challenge, but for the interior designers on the project, it offered opportunity. Islyn Studio envisaged the tiny rooms as portals into a dreamscape, and sought to find purpose for every inch. Open ceilings ensure the rooms never feel stuffy, but they’re are also fitted with slats for privacy and noise cancellation. Meanwhile, all furniture is custom-built to slot immaculately into its designated space. Ten fabulous cabins are even invigorated by the rainbow-hued murals of local artists, who repurpose the creamy walls as their personal canvas. And while it’s worth noting that bathrooms are communal, inside, the glossy earth tones exude sophisticated serenity, rivalling the design of most en suites.
