Best hotels in New York City | A Curated Visual Guide to Top Stays

Welcome to PressBeyond, the ultimate curated visual guide for design-driven hotels! My name is Will Miller and these are my recommendations for the best boutique and luxury hotels in New York City.

I am the founder of PressBeyond and I am an ultra-meticulous hotel curator who loves clean visuals. I have individually analyzed and tiered each hotel included in this guide based on a variety of criteria (architecture & design, location, brand & brand affiliation, existing reviews, and my own personal experiences), and importantly, I have hand-selected the leading imagery for each hotel to provide you with easily-digestible, yet detailed and complete, like-for-like, high-level visual profiles. I felt this summarization step was a critical missing piece across existing guides, blogs, and booking platforms. My aim is to make it easier for people to identify hotel environments that resonate with them, along with enabling them to visualize the types of social experiences that those environments help foster. My brain doesn't work when exposed to cluttered content, so my goal was to create the opposite.

Underneath this, we are also a full booking engine offering 5% Venmo cash back along with other exclusive perks. For all of you design-obsessed hotel enthusiasts out there, I hope this guide helps get you to where you see yourself!

An Overview of the Boutique & Luxury Hotel Landscape in New York City

Manhattan's relationship with its own past is never straightforward. The Waldorf Astoria, closed for eight years during a controversial renovation that stripped and redistributed much of its Art Deco interior across auction houses and salvage dealers, has returned — reduced from over 1,400 rooms to 375, with 372 residential condominiums occupying the upper floors in a conversion designed by Jean-Louis Deniot, and Pierre-Yves Rochon handling the hotel interiors. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill oversaw the restoration. It is a reminder that the city treats its grandest rooms as raw material, even when it also preserves them. The St. Regis on 55th Street, Beaux-Arts and still intact, operates in cleaner continuity with its 1904 origins. Midtown's upper registers remain anchored by institutions: the Peninsula in its 1905 Beaux-Arts building, the Park Hyatt inside the refined curtain wall of One57, Aman New York inhabiting the Crown Building's upper floors with Japanese-influenced interiors by Yabu Pushelberg that spend freely on silence. The Baccarat Hotel's Jean-Louis Deniot interiors, all silvered glass and crystal chandeliers facing the MoMA garden, stake a different claim — European maximalism as counterpoint to the neighborhood's corporate glass. Downtown tells a more layered story. In Tribeca, The Greenwich Hotel's handmade brick and salvaged wood — overseen in part by Robert De Niro, who has shaped its collecting instincts since opening — sits within blocks of the Four Seasons Downtown, where a more restrained contemporary luxury occupies a Gehry tower. Hotel Barrière Fouquet's brings a Parisian hospitality lineage to the same neighborhood with some tonal friction, which is not entirely a criticism. On the Lower East Side, Nine Orchard — a conversion of the 1927 Jarmulowsky Bank building designed by Kliment Halsband Architects — demonstrates what patient adaptive reuse can produce: a building whose original grandeur was never fully legible until a hotel came along to make it so. The Bowery Hotel and The Ludlow operate nearby with less architectural precision but a social density that fits the street. Brooklyn arrives late to this list but not tentatively. The William Vale in Williamsburg deploys a long, cantilevered slab above the rooflines with views that reframe the Manhattan skyline as something you're watching rather than inside. 1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge leans on its biophilic interiors and reclaimed materials with more earnestness than irony, which is its own position. The Hoxton Williamsburg extends that brand's formula — industrial bones, communal programming — without embarrassing itself in a neighborhood that reads those gestures fluently. The boroughs are no longer an afterthought; they're where the city's design arguments are still genuinely unresolved.

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Arlo Midtown

New York City • Midtown • OPTIMIZE

avg. $271 / night

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Arlo Midtown Design Editorial

Warm buff brick and a grid of dark-framed windows give the Midtown Manhattan block a quietly assertive presence — the kind of purpose-built hospitality architecture that chooses coherence over spectacle. Arlo Midtown, which brought the brand's second New York property to West 36th Street, was designed to serve the particular pressures of Midtown's business corridor while holding onto the approachable, design-literate sensibility that distinguished the original Arlo Hudson Square. The building's facade, visible in the images, carries the textural weight of mid-century New York commercial construction — recessed spandrels, rhythmic fenestration, a canopy entrance trimmed in warm brass that signals the tone of what lies inside. That tone is established most confidently in the lobby, where deeply pleated wood wall panels in pale ash create an acoustic and visual warmth reminiscent of mid-century Scandinavian interiors, the texture working against the hard geometry of the building's bones. Swing-arm brass pendants cast low pools of light over a seating arrangement that mixes tufted leather banquettes, cobalt velvet wingback chairs, and solid oak occasional tables — furniture that references postwar American lounge design without reproducing it directly. The bar presents a marble counter over a navy base, oak barstools with saddle-leather backs, and a backlit wall of zellige-style tile framing open shelving. Guest rooms are compact and considered: agate-patterned wallcoverings behind upholstered headboards, black steel open shelving, patterned loop-pile carpet, and views that frame the surrounding city with an unsentimental directness.

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The Ludlow Hotel

New York City • Lower East Side • SPLURGE

avg. $361 / night

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The Ludlow Hotel Design Editorial

Lower East Side credentials don't get much more persuasive than a red-brick warehouse facade on Ludlow Street, its steel-framed industrial windows and black-canopied ground floor carrying the particular grain of a neighborhood that spent a century as immigrant New York before artists and musicians claimed it. The Ludlow Hotel, which opened in 2014 across seven floors and 175 rooms, was developed by Sean MacPherson — the same mind behind the Bowery Hotel — with interiors conceived by Roman and Williams, the New York studio responsible for some of the most atmospherically intelligent hotel design of the past two decades. The approach here draws from the same well as their earlier work: dark-turned four-poster beds in ebonized wood, wide-plank oak floors, toile-print curtains layered over raw linen sheers, and shearling-draped armchairs that suggest a well-traveled collector's apartment rather than a hospitality product. The bar sits in what feels like a private club — coffered mahogany paneling, a marble-topped counter, crimson velvet stools, and sculptural brass chandeliers casting light that flatters rather than illuminates. Upstairs, the exposed beam ceilings and black-framed casement windows frame views across the Lower East Side rooftops toward One World Trade. Perhaps the most unexpectedly generous gesture is the garden conservatory: a vaulted glass-and-steel greenhouse trailed with hanging ivy, colored Moroccan lanterns suspended from the ribs, its back wall still bearing faded painted lettering from the building's earlier life.

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Refinery Hotel

New York City • Midtown • SPLURGE

avg. $391 / night

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Refinery Hotel Design Editorial

Built in 1912 as a millinery factory — one of the hatmaking workshops that once defined this stretch of West 38th Street in the Garment District — the building that houses the Refinery Hotel carries its industrial past with genuine conviction. The facade's Gothic-inflected terracotta ornament, visible in the images in crisp limestone-colored relief, gives the eleven-story structure a vertical energy unusual for a manufacturing building of its era. When the property converted to a hotel in 2012, the interior design team at Stonehill & Taylor preserved that mood rather than softening it: the vaulted bar downstairs, framed by full-length forest-green drapes and lit by cage lanterns, has the atmosphere of a private club that has been in continuous operation for decades. The 197 guestrooms maintain a consistent palette of dark walnut millwork, wide-plank ebonized floors, and brass fixture detailing — mid-century American workshop furniture interpreted as hotel furnishings, the desks and bedside tables suggesting a habitual rather than transient domesticity. Large-format abstract paintings in deep indigo hang in several room configurations, giving each space a singular focal point without veering into gallery affectation. Above it all, the rooftop bar and terrace — furnished with bistro tables, wrought-iron seating, and terracotta-cushioned lounge sofas amid planted greenery — frames a view straight up Fifth Avenue, the Empire State Building visible just blocks north, confirming the hotel's quietly advantageous position at the center of Manhattan's working fabric.

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The Beekman, A Thompson Hotel

New York City • Financial District • SPLURGE

avg. $436 / night

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The Beekman, A Thompson Hotel Design Editorial

Few downtown Manhattan buildings carry their Victorian ornament as confidently as 5 Beekman Street, a Temple Court structure dating to 1883 that architect James Renwick Jr.'s firm designed in the Romanesque Revival style before a complementary annex rose alongside it in 1894. The terra-cotta detailing, the steep mansard roof with its pointed slate turret, and the warm orange-red brick visible in the exterior images all survived long decades of neglect — the building sat empty for nearly forty years before Gerner Kronick + Valcarcel Architects led its restoration and conversion. When The Beekman opened in 2016 across its 287 rooms and eleven floors, the defining interior gesture was already baked into the structure: an extraordinary nine-storey skylit atrium, its cast-iron tiers rising in ornate balconies to a pyramidal glass ceiling. Martin Brudnizki Design Studio handled the guest rooms, threading a deliberately layered sensibility through each one — smoked-glass Murano-style chandeliers suspended from plaster crown molding, nailhead-trimmed upholstered headboards in leather and linen, wide-plank dark oak floors, and jewel-toned overdyed rugs in teal and cobalt that anchor sitting areas furnished with velvet armchairs and cane-backed occasional chairs. The contrast with the basement bar — exposed brick, raw ductwork, a curved copper-topped counter lit by fringed table lamps, the whole room carrying the atmosphere of a Prohibition-era speakeasy — demonstrates Brudnizki's range. The ground-floor brasserie, with its hand-painted ceramic tile panels, antiqued mirror walls, and Thonet bentwood chairs, completes a property that wears its architectural inheritance lightly and with evident pleasure.

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Nine Orchard

New York City • Lower East Side • SPLURGE

avg. $499 / night

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Nine Orchard Design Editorial

Built in 1912 to serve the Jewish immigrant community flooding into the Lower East Side, the Jarmulowsky Bank Building was an act of architectural ambition — a twelve-story Beaux-Arts tower designed by William Lawrence Rouse and Lafayette A. Goldstone that announced, in limestone and ornamental carving, that this neighborhood had arrived. When Nine Orchard opened here in 2022, the restoration team worked directly from those original blueprints, and the results are visible in every coffered ceiling panel, every dentil cornice, and in the Swan Room's reinstated ornamental plasterwork soaring above a floor of pink Tennessee marble. The banking hall, now the hotel's bar and lounge, retains its double-height nave proportions, with a multi-globe chandelier descending through the room and the original arched windows casting light across marble and dark walnut millwork. Interior designers Reza Nouranian and Fernando Santangelo, collaborating with Ray Azoulay, brought a sensibility that refuses period pastiche. The 113 guest rooms layer warm oak floors with chromatic headboards — one in crimson fabric, another in embroidered textile suggesting Central Asian ikat — alongside tubular-steel chairs in the lineage of Marcel Breuer and olive velvet drapes that give the rooms a particular suspended quality, as though the building's institutional past and a more private, lived-in present have reached a quiet agreement. The clock on the facade still keeps time, and inside, so does everything else.

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The Wall Street Hotel

New York City • Financial District • SPLURGE

avg. $520 / night

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The Wall Street Hotel Design Editorial

At 11 stories, the terracotta-clad Beaux-Arts tower at 11 Wall Street has held a particular weight in American financial history — this was the home of the New York Stock Exchange's original annex building, completed in 1901, and its ornate cornice work and rusticated limestone base carry the authority of an era when banking institutions built for permanence. The Wall Street Hotel, which opened in 2021 after an extensive conversion, inhabits that gravitas while pulling firmly against it, with interiors by the New York firm Stonehill Taylor translating the building's mercantile heritage into something closer to a cultivated private residence than a monument to capital. The rooms work a palette of powder blue, warm cream, and soft grey across tufted upholstered headboards, hand-tufted patterned carpets, and canopy bed frames draped in sheer linen — the atmosphere somewhere between a well-appointed Manhattan apartment and a European grand hotel, grounded by brass swing-arm reading lamps and dark lacquered nightstands. The bar and lounge lean into the building's downtown mythology more directly, with large-scale hand-painted murals depicting the historic Manhattan skyline stretched between the original fluted columns, the seating arranged in an eclectic mix of leopard-print club chairs, tufted sofas, and polished walnut side tables. The restaurant, by contrast, turns intimate — hunter-green ceilings, deep burgundy banquettes, and a dramatic botanical-print wall covering that shifts the register entirely toward the quietly theatrical.

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1 Hotel Central Park

New York City • Central Park • SPLURGE

avg. $532 / night

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1 Hotel Central Park Design Editorial

Ivy cascades down a terracotta brick facade on West 58th Street in a gesture that announces the 1 Hotel Central Park's central argument before you've stepped inside: that a luxury hotel in one of Manhattan's densest corridors can build its identity entirely around living material. Opened in 2015 as part of Barry Sternlicht's sustainability-forward brand, the property was designed by interior firm Rockwell Group working within an existing early twentieth-century building, the exterior's dense vertical planting giving way to a lobby where trailing pothos and moss balls hang from a darkened ceiling above furniture assembled from reclaimed teak stumps, worn leather, and slabs of richly veined onyx. The 229 rooms carry that material philosophy into private space without strain — reclaimed barn wood ceiling beams, Calacatta marble shower enclosures framed in blackened steel, wide-plank oak floors, and built-in window seats dressed in linen that invite the street view rather than screen it out. Sheepskin throws draped over hairpin-leg desk chairs introduce softness against the rawer textures, and terrarium centerpieces on work surfaces reinforce the biophilic thread running through the entire property. The restaurant continues the tone: exposed ductwork painted white, original brick walls left bare, steel-framed windows looking directly into the planted facade, and bentwood dining chairs giving the room the atmosphere of a well-considered urban greenhouse rather than a hotel dining room.

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The Ned NoMad

New York City • NoMad • SPLURGE

avg. $533 / night

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The Ned NoMad Design Editorial

At the convergence of Broadway and Sixth Avenue, the Johnston Building has commanded this particular slice of NoMad since 1902, its limestone Beaux-Arts facade rising twelve stories to a cupola-crowned corner that still stops pedestrians mid-stride. Schickel & Ditmars designed it with the confidence of an era that believed ornament was a civic obligation, and the building has outlasted a dozen incarnations — most recently as the NoMad Hotel — before The Ned NoMad arrived in 2022, transforming it into a 167-room hotel and members' club with Soho House Design leading the interiors in collaboration with Stonehill Taylor. What Soho House Design understood, correctly, is that the building's bones demanded an interior atmosphere rather than a decorating scheme. The guestrooms layer worn Persian rugs over original wide-plank timber floors, pair clawfoot tubs with damask folding screens, and furnish corners with leather club chairs that carry the feeling of a well-loved private library. The bar drops deep into dark mahogany paneling, mosaic tile floors, and amber lamp shades that dissolve the hour entirely — a room that performs 1920s New York with genuine conviction rather than nostalgic pastiche. A separate lounge wraps a baby grand in terra-cotta paneling and fringed lampshades, the marbled ceiling cornice above suggesting the whole thing was always here, waiting to be uncovered.

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The Langham, New York, 5th Avenue - Image 1

The Langham, New York, 5th Avenue - Image 2

The Langham, New York, 5th Avenue - Image 3

The Langham, New York, 5th Avenue

New York City • Midtown • SPLURGE

avg. $618 / night

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The Langham, New York, 5th Avenue Design Editorial

Rising fifty-two floors above Fifth Avenue at 400 Fifth, the tower designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill gives The Langham New York 5th Avenue one of Midtown's more quietly distinctive silhouettes — its faceted glass curtain wall catching and fracturing light in a diamond-patterned rhythm that distinguishes it from the flat-faced corporate slabs surrounding it, with the Empire State Building visible in the mid-distance from nearly every west-facing room. The hotel's 214 rooms were conceived to give the property a residential rather than transactional atmosphere, and the images bear that out: pale-toned armchairs with mid-century proportions, walnut-finished millwork running the length of suites, and large-format canvases including bold floral paintings that push against the otherwise neutral palette. The food and beverage spaces shift register entirely — Ai Fiori, the fine-dining restaurant designed with warm cherry-wood floors, dark stone columns, and linen-draped round tables, established serious culinary ambitions when Michael White opened it here in 2010. The bar carries a darker sensibility: Calacatta marble counter, mirrored ceiling panels, dark wenge-toned wall cladding, and oversized peony photographs that lend the room a moodier, more nocturnal quality. Across all the spaces, the hotel navigates the particular challenge of inserting a refined, European-inflected hospitality brand into a purpose-built American commercial tower — and largely succeeds by keeping the interiors calm enough to let the city views do the talking.

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The New York EDITION

New York City • Flatiron Disctrict • SPLURGE

avg. $637 / night

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The New York EDITION Design Editorial

Napoleon LeBrun's 1909 Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower — modeled closely on the campanile of St. Mark's Basilica in Venice, its gilded crown still visible from much of lower Manhattan — was once the tallest building in the world. Ian Schrager brought the New York EDITION into its lower floors in 2015, commissioning his longtime collaborator John Pawson to translate the Beaux-Arts monument into a hotel of 273 rooms across 25 floors. Pawson's approach, as ever, strips sensation back to its essentials: the guest rooms are exercises in warm restraint, with pale oak floors, barrel-vaulted plaster ceilings that recall the building's classical origins, and oversized dark-stained paneled headboards set against walls in creamy off-white. Faux-fur throws and articulated brass reading lamps supply the only domestic texture in spaces that might otherwise approach the ascetic. The ground-floor restaurants tell a different story. The Clocktower preserves original dark-walnut paneling, ornate plasterwork cornices, and Beaux-Arts proportions intact, dressing them with green velvet barrel chairs and tufted banquettes and a gallery-dense hang of gold-framed black-and-white photography that gives the room the atmosphere of a well-aged Manhattan supper club. The bar, meanwhile, pulls in another direction entirely — slatted timber ceiling panels, tobacco-toned walls, and a backlit amber whisky wall create an enclosing, after-dark warmth that sits in deliberate contrast to the Pawson austerity one floor above.

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The Fifth Avenue Hotel

New York City • NoMad • OVER THE TOP

avg. $680 / night

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The Fifth Avenue Hotel Design Editorial

Few addresses in New York carry the architectural authority of a McKim, Mead & White commission, and the landmarked 1907 Beaux-Arts mansion at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 28th Street announces itself accordingly — rusticated limestone, a grand arched entrance, and the kind of civic gravitas that once belonged exclusively to banks and government buildings. The Fifth Avenue Hotel, which arrived in 2023, is set within this original structure alongside a new 24-story glass tower by Perkins Eastman and PBDW Architects, the two buildings together producing 153 rooms and suites in the heart of NoMad. Where the exterior maintains its composed, classical bearing, Martin Brudnizki's interiors do something altogether more theatrical. The MBDS approach here draws deep on Gilded Age excess and global eclecticism — rooms arrive in saturated veridian greens and amber golds, furnished with rattan folding screens, antique Persian rugs, and star-shaped ceiling fixtures that catch the light like something between a 1970s Italian palazzo and a Wes Anderson fever dream. A restaurant dominated by full-grown ficus trees and tiered brass chandeliers projects a different kind of grandeur, one that is living and slightly unruly. The bar, clad in dark walnut paneling with crimson velvet sofas gathered around a marble fireplace, settles into something more conspiratorial. Threading through all of it are more than 700 works of art, antique and contemporary, which give the hotel the density and feeling of a private collection rather than a curated backdrop.

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Pendry Manhattan West

New York City • Hudson Yards • OVER THE TOP

avg. $725 / night

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Pendry Manhattan West Design Editorial

At 438 Manhattan West, where the Hudson Yards development meets the older grain of Chelsea, a tower clad in darkly rippled terracotta — its surface patterned in undulating horizontal ridges that catch light differently at every hour — announces a building with more formal ambition than most new Manhattan hotels dare. Pendry Manhattan West, which opened in 2021 as the brand's first New York property, was designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill with interiors by the Rockwell Group, the 164-room, 30-floor tower positioned to draw on the energy of the adjacent Moynihan Train Hall corridor and the High Line without being consumed by either. Inside, the Rockwell Group navigates two distinct registers. The guestrooms keep things spare and warm — white oak platform beds, linen-upholstered headboards with recessed LED coves, pairs of terracotta-red swivel chairs pulled toward floor-to-ceiling windows framing views across the low Chelsea roofline. The restaurant level shifts the mood entirely: dense tropical plantings suspended from the ceiling, a patterned mosaic floor in dark graphite, and pendant-lit round tables that give the space the atmosphere of a conservatory rather than a hotel dining room. The bar descends further in register still — a barrel-vaulted niche in aged green-toned plaster, marble counter edged with mushroom-capped brass lamps, chrome-footed stools with tweed seat rings, the black-and-white diagonal tile floor below recalling downtown Manhattan drinking rooms of an earlier era.

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Casa Cipriani New York

New York City • Financial District • OVER THE TOP

avg. $770 / night

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Casa Cipriani New York Design Editorial

Built in 1909 by the architect Walker & Morris as the Beaux-Arts home of the Battery Maritime Building, the cast-iron and steel ferry terminal at the foot of Manhattan has long been one of the harbor's most ornate civic structures — its green-painted colonnade and filigree metalwork facing the same waters that once carried commuters to Governors Island. Casa Cipriani New York, which claimed the building's upper floors in 2021, had the rare advantage of a shell already charged with history, and the design team — led by Thierry Despont, the French-American architect and decorator responsible for the restoration of the Statue of Liberty's interior — leaned into that inheritance rather than competing with it. The 47 rooms and suites carry Despont's characteristic register: lacquered black millwork frames the original tall windows, walls in burnt sienna and deep tobacco velvet ground the palette without overwhelming it, and bedroom furniture runs to high-gloss walnut case pieces and upholstered headboards in ivory linen. The bar and restaurant, branded as the 10 Corso Como of the Cipriani world, are rendered in oxblood lacquer panels and mirrored ceilings, leather-topped stools at a curved counter evoking a certain mid-century Venetian confidence. On the roof, a marble-topped outdoor bar frames the lower Manhattan skyline — One World Trade visible above the parapet — while the ornamental columns of the terminal's upper loggia remain visible through the guestroom doors, insisting that the building, not the brand, is the primary fact here.

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Hotel Barrière Fouquet's New York - Image 1

Hotel Barrière Fouquet's New York - Image 2

Hotel Barrière Fouquet's New York - Image 3

Hotel Barrière Fouquet's New York

New York City • Tribeca • OVER THE TOP

avg. $784 / night

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Hotel Barrière Fouquet's New York Design Editorial

Bringing a century-old Parisian brasserie tradition to the cobblestoned streets of Tribeca required a certain conviction — the kind that Martine And Thierry Gillier brought when the Barrière group extended its Fouquet's brand to New York, opening Hotel Barrière Fouquet's New York in 2021 within a purpose-built six-storey structure clad in warm red brick with deep-set steel windows. The massing, designed to settle into the neighbourhood's warehouse vernacular, presents as a converted loft building from the street, the broad grid of industrial glazing and corbelled cornice lines folding the hotel into its surroundings without apology. Inside, Gilles & Boissier — the Paris-based studio behind the original Fouquet's Barrière on the Champs-Élysées — carried their signature across the Atlantic: diamond-quilted headboards framed in tortoiseshell lacquer and burnished gold, sage velvet cushions against blush upholstery, Murano glass chandeliers casting a warm pink flush across 97 rooms and suites. The bar arrives saturated in plum and burgundy, a veined marble counter edged in brass anchoring a room that owes more to a Left Bank private club than anything currently operating below Canal Street. The restaurant deploys cascading crystal chandeliers above red velvet dining chairs and white-clothed tables, the warm walnut millwork keeping the European formality from tipping into pastiche. Gold-framed mirrored partitions in the suites extend the rooms visually while layering in the kind of 1930s Parisian glamour that Gilles & Boissier return to again and again — luxuriant without being heavy, and surprisingly at home in downtown Manhattan.

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Park Hyatt New York

New York City • Upper Midtown • OVER THE TOP

avg. $888 / night

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Park Hyatt New York Design Editorial

Burnham's vision of a skyscraper as pure civic gesture found an unlikely descendant in the 90-storey glass tower that Skidmore, Owings & Merrill completed on West 57th Street in 2014 — a building whose residential upper floors sit above the 210 rooms of Park Hyatt New York, the brand's first American flagship. The tower's dark-tinted curtain wall, visible in the entrance image as a taut grid of near-black glass and polished metal, carries a precision that few Midtown hotels attempt. Yabu Pushelberg handled the interiors, and their signature discipline — materials chosen for depth rather than drama — runs through every space: the lobby floor laid in richly veined brown-grey marble, walls clad in horizontal-grain travertine, mosaic-tiled pillars casting warm light across a lounge furnished with low velvet club chairs and tufted settees. Guest rooms continue this restrained material logic, their limestone floors and cognac leather armchairs framing floor-to-ceiling glazing that pulls Central Park into the room as the primary decorative gesture. Suites are divided by etched glass partitions with bronze detailing, the geometric patterning echoing the custom area rugs below. Most arresting is the 25th-floor indoor pool, its double-height volume wrapped in bookmatched grey-veined stone, suspended cube lanterns dropping from the ceiling in a cascading grid — a room that manages genuine calm against a backdrop of Midtown rooftops pressing close on every side.

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The Ritz-Carlton New York, NoMad - Image 1

The Ritz-Carlton New York, NoMad - Image 2

The Ritz-Carlton New York, NoMad - Image 3

The Ritz-Carlton New York, NoMad

New York City • NoMad • OVER THE TOP

avg. $909 / night

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The Ritz-Carlton New York, NoMad Design Editorial

At 580 feet and 38 stories, the slender concrete tower Rafael Viñoly Architects raised at 1185 Broadway is one of the more self-assured pieces of new construction to arrive in Midtown Manhattan in years — and The Ritz-Carlton New York, NoMad, which opened within it in 2022, earns the address. The building's massing is distinctive from the skyline: an exposed concrete frame visually lifts the tower away from its five-story L-shaped podium, giving the whole composition a quiet structural honesty rarely associated with luxury hospitality. The hotel draws its design narrative from the 28th Street Flower District immediately to the south, a conceit that could easily tip into pastiche but is handled with enough restraint across the 250 guest rooms to feel like atmosphere rather than theme. The interiors were divided among four studios — Rockwell Group, Lázaro Rosa-Violán, Martin Brudnizki Design Studio, and SUSURRUS International — and the divisions are legible in the images. Guest rooms by Rockwell carry warm limed oak paneling, nero marquina marble bases, and looping brass chandelier forms against floor-to-ceiling city views. The lobby lounge shifts register entirely: deep lacquered walls, jewel-toned velvets in celadon and teal, and organic branching light fixtures that feel closer to a private drawing room than a hotel common area. Most dramatically, the rooftop bar — almost certainly Brudnizki's hand — wraps blush-pink curved banquettes beneath teal ceilings hung with saucer-shaped brass pendants, the Hudson glittering through wraparound glass behind it all.

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Baccarat Hotel & Residences

New York City • Midtown • OVER THE TOP

avg. $935 / night

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Baccarat Hotel & Residences Design Editorial

Crystal has been Baccarat's medium since 1764, and when the French manufacture opened its first hotel in 2015, the entire building at 28 West 53rd Street in Midtown Manhattan became an extension of that proposition. Designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill with interiors by Tony Ingrao, the Baccarat Hotel New York rises 50 floors and contains 114 rooms and suites, its street-level facade a luminous wall of fluted glass rods that shimmer like an architectural chandelier — a direct translation of the brand's material identity into built form. An open flame set between the three darkened entrance portals, flanked by clipped boxwood topiaries in lacquered planters, gives the arrival sequence an almost ceremonial gravity. Inside, the Grand Salon stretches two floors beneath cascading Baccarat chandeliers, floor-to-ceiling silk drapery in champagne and blush framing display vitrines filled with crystal objects as if the lobby were simultaneously a museum gallery and a private house of extraordinary scale. The rooms shift between two distinct registers: lighter suites with dark mahogany four-poster beds, white panelled walls, and sheer linen curtains filtering 53rd Street light; and deeper, more nocturnal suites where book-matched macassar ebony panels surround polished chrome canopy frames and cowhide rugs anchor seating arrangements in chocolate leather. The Petit Salon bar, saturated in oxblood lacquer with black-and-white harlequin floors and red Baccarat chandelier drops overhead, channels a very particular idea of Parisian glamour transplanted, uncompromisingly, to Midtown.

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The St. Regis New York

New York City • Midtown • OVER THE TOP

avg. $980 / night

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The St. Regis New York Design Editorial

John Jacob Astor IV commissioned Trowbridge & Livingston to design a Beaux-Arts palazzo on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 55th Street, and when the St. Regis New York opened in 1904, it set a standard for Manhattan hotel architecture that the city has spent twelve decades failing to surpass. The limestone facade, eighteen stories of disciplined French Renaissance detailing, arrives on Fifth Avenue with a self-possession that newer buildings on the same corridor can only envy. The copper-domed entrance canopy visible in the images — warm-lit against the stone at night — establishes the register immediately: this is a building that takes ceremony seriously. Inside, the rooms preserve their original plasterwork cornices and ceiling moldings while layering in a mix of Louis XV-style armchairs, croc-embossed leather trunks, and floor-length velvet drapes in emerald and tobacco — a combination that walks the line between period authenticity and contemporary dressing. The King Cole Bar remains the property's defining interior moment: Maxfield Parrish's 1906 mural of Old King Cole, nearly eight feet tall and framed in dark mahogany paneling, presides over green leather bar stools and leopard-print carpet with the absolute confidence of a painting that has never needed to justify its presence. The Astor Court dining room carries the same assurance — trompe-l'oeil cloud ceilings, gilt cornices, and crystal chandeliers sustaining a vision of Edwardian grandeur that subsequent renovations have wisely chosen to amplify rather than revise.

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The Lowell

New York City • Central Park • OVER THE TOP

avg. $994 / night

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LHW Leaders Club property

The Lowell Design Editorial

At 28 East 63rd Street, just off Madison Avenue on one of the Upper East Side's quietest residential blocks, a 1927 Art Deco tower in rose-hued brick has spent nearly a century resisting every pressure to behave like a conventional Manhattan hotel. The Lowell was built as a luxury apartment building and has never entirely shed that identity — its 74 rooms and suites remain among the most apartment-like in New York, most with wood-burning fireplaces and private terraces, the proportions domestic rather than institutional. The entrance facade, visible in the images, carries its original ornamental detailing intact: the polychrome terra-cotta pediment above the door, the Greek key frieze at the canopy, brass-framed doors flanked by clipped box topiaries that signal a private club more than a hotel lobby. The interiors across different room categories share a consistent sensibility — silk-striped wallcovering, brass-tipped steel four-poster beds dressed in cream and camel, Oushak-style rugs over close-cropped carpet, leather club chairs, mirrored nightstands catching lamplight. The Pembroke Room, the hotel's celebrated breakfast salon, shows the building's original arched ceiling articulated in plaster, lit softly to read almost like a conservatory, towering floral arrangements anchoring each round table set in blue glass. The bar, refined in a recent update, pairs warm oak panelling with a geometric inlaid floor and a rose marble counter — restrained without feeling spare, which is precisely the tone the Lowell has sustained across its long life on this block.

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The Peninsula New York

New York City • Midtown • OVER THE TOP

avg. $996 / night

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The Peninsula New York Design Editorial

At 700 Fifth Avenue, where 55th Street intersects one of Manhattan's most surveilled blocks of pavement, a Beaux-Arts limestone tower completed in 1905 to designs by Harde & Short has held its ground against a century of Midtown reinvention with uncommon composure. The building's facade, visible in the images, remains one of the most ornate on Fifth Avenue — heavily rusticated base, paired Corinthian columns flanking the entrance, and a cartouche of sculpted figures above the porte-cochère that carries genuine sculptural ambition rather than mere decorative obligation. The Peninsula New York, which has inhabited the building since 1988 following an earlier life as the Gotham Hotel, spread 239 rooms and suites across its upper floors, with the Hong Kong-headquartered group bringing its characteristic standard of finish to a structure that needed no architectural apology. Inside, the guest rooms shown here settle into a palette of warm champagne and ivory, with dark mahogany case pieces, patterned wool carpet in a tonal scroll motif, and gilt-framed floor mirrors lending the spaces the considered weight of a well-appointed Manhattan apartment rather than anonymous hotel accommodation. The rooftop bar, photographed against the Midtown skyline at dusk, deploys iron cross-back chairs, wicker lounge groupings, and planted urns of lavender against a panorama of illuminated glass towers — the city providing a backdrop that no interior designer could commission. The restaurant space, with its amber-lit textured wall panels framed in steel and a gallery-dense arrangement of antique mirrors, arrives as the sharpest contemporary intervention in an otherwise classically anchored building.

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Waldorf Astoria New York

New York City • Midtown • OVER THE TOP

avg. $1,515 / night

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Waldorf Astoria New York Design Editorial

Eight years of scaffolding, two billion dollars, and one of the most closely watched restorations in American architectural history — and now 301 Park Avenue is whole again. The Waldorf Astoria New York, designed in 1931 by Schultze & Weaver and reopened in July 2025, has always been more civic monument than simple hotel, and the scale of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's intervention honors exactly that weight. SOM preserved approximately 62,000 square feet of landmarked interiors, returning the Park Avenue Lobby's 'Wheel of Life' mosaic floor, the Grand Ballroom, and Peacock Alley to their original Art Deco authority. The lobby photographs confirm what the drawings promised: those richly veined dark marble columns still anchor the room, the famous gilded clock holds court beside a grand piano, and a luminous cherry-blossom bar backdrop gives the space just enough contemporary warmth without tipping into pastiche. Pierre-Yves Rochon handled the hotel interiors — 375 guest rooms spread across floors seven through fifteen — and the rooms show his characteristic discipline: pale stone headboard panels, brass hardware, upholstered X-bench stools, and layered neutrals that feel quietly confident rather than anonymous. The restaurant rendering suggests a softer register: fluted ivory columns, moss-green velvet seating, globe chandeliers on brass armatures, and Verde Guatemala marble underfoot, a palette that draws from the building's Art Deco DNA while breathing at a more contemporary frequency. Jean-Louis Deniot claims the 372 residences above, completing a tower that now contains two distinct but related worlds.

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Aman New York

New York City • Midtown • OVER THE TOP

avg. $1,746 / night

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Aman New York Design Editorial

Warren & Wetmore's Crown Building has always been one of Midtown's most theatrical pieces of architecture — a 1921 Beaux-Arts tower at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street whose gilded cornices and rusticated limestone facade carry the kind of civic ambition that Manhattan rarely attempts anymore. Aman New York, which arrived here in 2022, carved its 83 suites across floors seven through fourteen, letting Belgian architect Jean-Michel Gathy of Denniston navigate the productive friction between the building's neoclassical bones and Aman's characteristically meditative interior language. That tension resolves beautifully in the rooms, where deep-toned ebonized furniture, linen-panelled headboard walls, and freestanding fireplaces in darkened steel create an atmosphere closer to a Japanese ryokan than a conventional Manhattan hotel suite. Ink-wash murals drift across plaster in the manner of Song Dynasty scrolls, while wide-plank oak floors and sheer Roman blinds soften the city light pressing in from the original windows. The 14th-floor Garden Terrace — visible in the exterior image, set behind the original stone balustrade — brings the outside in with live plantings and tensile canopies suspended above the Beaux-Arts parapet. Deeper inside, the three-storey spa features a lap pool lined in teak and warm stone, flanked by oversized dome pendants in copper-backed white. It is a space that absorbs rather than performs — which, given Aman's brand of studied quietude dropped into one of the loudest corners of the city, seems precisely the point.

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Arlo SoHo

New York City • SoHo • OPTIMIZE

avg. $258 / night

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Arlo SoHo Design Editorial

Red brick and steel-framed windows rising above Hudson Square — the kind of warehouse-adjacent massing that SoHo has exported as an aesthetic to the rest of the world — set the physical terms for Arlo SoHo before you step inside. Opened in 2016 and designed by INC Architecture & Design, the 325-room property makes a deliberate argument about small-footprint urban hotels: that constraint, handled well, produces atmosphere rather than compromise. The facade's globe-lit canopy and dark steel entrance framing carry the energy of the neighborhood's cast-iron district heritage without cosplaying it. Inside, INC's approach to the guest rooms centers on warm-toned walnut millwork built around the bed like a cabin bunk — a wood-paneled alcove that frames the window view and folds desk, shelving, and articulated black task lamps into a single continuous surface. The effect draws from Japanese spatial thinking, making rooms that run as small as 150 square feet feel considered rather than squeezed. The street-level Harold's restaurant counters the rooms' introversion with an open, market-hall energy: geometric cement floor tiles in a blue-and-white diamond pattern, overscale factory pendant lights in matte navy, bentwood chairs, and a visible wood-fired oven anchoring the back wall. On the roof, terracotta umbrellas and Edison string lights frame a skyline view that takes in One World Trade to the south.

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Gild Hall, A Thompson Hotel

New York City • Financial District • SPLURGE

avg. $303 / night

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World of Hyatt property

Gild Hall, A Thompson Hotel Design Editorial

Down in the Financial District, where lower Manhattan's street grid tightens around buildings that once housed the machinery of American commerce, a late-nineteenth-century brick structure on Gold Street was converted into Gild Hall — a Thompson Hotels property that draws its design identity directly from the neighborhood's mercantile past. The name itself signals the intent: this is a hotel that wants to feel like a private guild, a place where money and taste were once transacted in paneled rooms by candlelight. That atmosphere carries through every space visible in the images. The ground-floor bar works a checkerboard stone floor against dark burl-wood wall paneling and tufted oxblood leather banquettes, pendant fixtures ringed with industrial bulbs hanging from a coffered ceiling — the whole room evoking a downtown club that has been drinking seriously since 1890. The restaurant doubles down on the same vocabulary: amber-stained paneling, globe pendant lights wrapped in leather straps, striped velvet curtains dividing booths with a theatricality that avoids camp through sheer material confidence. Guest rooms pull the palette upward — saddle-brown leather headboards rising nearly to the ceiling, graphic trellis wallpaper in gold and cream, brass ring chandeliers, and dark-lacquered casework with burnished hardware. Across the property's 126 rooms, the effect is a consistent, considered masculinity that suits its address without feeling costumed.

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The Times Square EDITION

New York City • Times Square • SPLURGE

avg. $372 / night

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The Times Square EDITION Design Editorial

Placing a hotel conceived around calm and considered materiality at the centre of the world's loudest intersection is either a provocation or a masterstroke, and Ian Schrager's Times Square EDITION — a 452-room tower designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill rising 41 floors above the junction of Seventh Avenue and 47th Street — makes a persuasive case for the latter. The building's lower podium wraps in a vast curved LED billboard visible in the exterior images, its digital foliage cascading against the square's perpetual neon; above that threshold, the tower shifts register entirely, a glass curtain wall climbing toward a recessed crown with the discipline of a corporate skyscraper that has decided, quietly, to mean something else. Inside, the interiors designed by Schrager in collaboration with his longtime creative partners carry the spare, Nordic warmth that defines the EDITION brand globally: blonde herringbone oak floors, bleached timber headboards, marble-topped round tables, and floor-to-ceiling sheers filtering midtown light into something closer to Nordic afternoon than Times Square noon. The rooftop bar cuts against that serenity with living green walls and lantern-lit ironwork furniture against a billboard-saturated dusk. Most dramatically, the subterranean nightclub — crimson velvet curtains, a radial neon ceiling fixture, and a Bosch-like mural consuming the back wall — abandons restraint altogether, turning the tension between sanctuary and spectacle that defines the whole property into something genuinely theatrical.

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ModernHaus SoHo

New York City • SoHo • SPLURGE

avg. $402 / night

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ModernHaus SoHo Design Editorial

Few downtown Manhattan hotels manage the tonal gap between a neighborhood defined by cast-iron loft buildings and the ambitions of a new-build tower, but ModernHaus SoHo makes a credible attempt at it. The building, a slim concrete-framed structure rising above Spring Street, was designed by Gwathmey Siegel — the firm whose brutalist-inflected modernism always carried a particular New York confidence — and its street-level entrance does its best to meet the neighborhood on its own terms: honed white brick cladding, warm ipe timber detailing, and clipped topiary in tall concrete planters soften what could easily have announced itself as an intrusion. Inside, the 114 rooms are arranged across multiple floors and finished with dark-stained oak flooring, upholstered platform beds, and floating walnut nightstands — a material register that hovers between Scandinavian restraint and mid-century American warmth. The art program leans toward bold primary-colored works reminiscent of Calder and Miró, framed above beds and catching the corner light that the generous window proportions encourage. Upstairs, the rooftop pool deck frames a wide Hudson River panorama toward Jersey City, its navy-cushioned loungers arranged on pale stone paving with the unhurried confidence of a property that knows the view does most of the work. The bar level, curved glass wrapped around a deep brown leather banquette, belongs to a different and more nocturnal register entirely.

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Walker Hotel Greenwich Village - Image 1

Walker Hotel Greenwich Village - Image 2

Walker Hotel Greenwich Village - Image 3

Walker Hotel Greenwich Village

New York City • Greenwich Village • SPLURGE

avg. $427 / night

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Walker Hotel Greenwich Village Design Editorial

At the corner of 13th Street in Greenwich Village, a 1920s brick-clad building with an elaborately ornamented entry arch — fanlight window, terra cotta relief panels, stepped pilasters — sets a tone that the Walker Hotel Greenwich Village carries deep into its interior. The lobby delivers on that architectural promise: backlit honey onyx stairs rise toward a leaded transom door, their iron balustrades curving in an Art Nouveau gesture that feels entirely native to the building rather than installed for effect. Behind the reception desk, original exposed brickwork anchors the room while translucent shoji-like light panels add an unexpectedly Eastern counterpoint, a collision of references that somehow coheres in the warm, amber-toned light. The 116 guestrooms sustain the Art Deco commitment with genuine conviction — macassar ebony headboards framed by fan-patterned wallcoverings in either crimson or sapphire, chrome-based table lamps, and tufted white leather benches at the foot of each bed. Higher floors reward guests with views across lower Manhattan toward One World Trade, the steel-grid windows functioning almost as period frames around a contemporary skyline. The restaurant works a different register entirely: pressed tin ceilings, walnut panelling, teal leather banquettes, a working fireplace, and trailing ivy glimpsed through a glazed ceiling void give the room the atmosphere of a well-worn Flatiron-era dining club that has aged into something comfortable and genuinely inviting.

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The Standard, High Line

New York City • Meatpacking District • SPLURGE

avg. $508 / night

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The Standard, High Line Design Editorial

Straddling the High Line at West 13th Street — literally bridging the elevated park on two concrete piloti columns painted a saturated red — the building designed by Polshek Partnership Architects and completed in 2009 gave The Standard High Line one of the most legible structural conceits in contemporary New York hospitality. The 18-floor, 338-room tower was conceived as a kind of urban theater, its floor-to-ceiling glazing on the Hudson-facing elevations turning every room into both a viewing platform and, famously, a display case visible to passersby on the park below. Roman and Williams handled the interiors, threading warmth through the tower's cool modernist envelope with slatted teak wall cladding, oval pendant lights, and Arne Jacobsen-adjacent seating in cognac leather — all visible across the room images here, where the Hudson River and Jersey City skyline fill the glazed corners at sunset. The rooftop Le Bain and bar spaces push further into sensory overload, with parquet floors in a deep amber hardwood, chain-link metal ceiling panels, and arched timber-clad volumes that carry a downtown supper-club energy quite distinct from the restrained guest rooms below. At ground level, the Biergarten carved beneath the High Line's concrete structure commits fully to its premise — brick pavers, pine trestle tables, Cornilleau ping-pong, and yellow-shaded pendants hanging from exposed steel framework — a space that belongs as much to the neighborhood as to the hotel above it.

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1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge

New York City • Brooklyn • SPLURGE

avg. $532 / night

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1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge Design Editorial

Raw timber fins screening a Corten steel entrance monolith — that arresting threshold sets the ecological ambition of 1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge before a guest has crossed it. Opened in 2017 on the DUMBO waterfront, the 194-room property was designed by interior studio Rockwell Group with a brief from founder Barry Sternlicht to make sustainability feel inevitable rather than performative. The building itself is a new-construction tower rising above Brooklyn Bridge Park, but the design language reaches for reclamation: salvaged hardwoods, rough-cut stone boulders arranged like glacial erratics at the entrance, and living moss installations tucked into bathroom vanity islands where another hotel might place a vase. Guest rooms frame the Brooklyn Bridge and Lower Manhattan skyline through floor-to-ceiling black steel windows, with herringbone plank floors, linen drapes in warm sand, and side tables fashioned from raw timber cross-sections establishing a register closer to a well-worn cabin than a conventional city hotel. The bar spaces layer horizontal slatted-wood screens over dense plantings, pendant lamps in woven shades casting amber light across polished concrete floors and plaid-upholstered banquettes. Above it all, a rooftop pool edged in hand-laid tile sits flush against the East River parapet, the Lower Manhattan skyline — One World Trade catching the last of the sun — arranged behind it with an almost unreasonable compositional generosity.

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Andaz 5th Avenue

New York City • Midtown • SPLURGE

avg. $548 / night

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Andaz 5th Avenue Design Editorial

Facing Bryant Park at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 41st Street, where Midtown's institutional granite gives way to the park's canopy of London planes, the Andaz 5th Avenue was carved from a purpose-built tower designed by Buttrick White & Burtis and opened in 2010. The facade's limestone cladding and bronze-framed storefront windows — visible in the images as a double-height grid of darkened steel and warm glass — place the building in deliberate conversation with the Beaux-Arts bulk of the New York Public Library directly opposite, while the gilded botanical panel above the entrance door signals something more decorative within. Tony Chi designed the interiors across the hotel's 184 rooms and 16 floors, and his signature runs through every register of the public spaces: a lobby anchored by a faceted white sculptural form rising from the check-in desk, dark basalt-format floor tiles, and a field of cylindrical ceiling lights that give the arrival sequence the atmosphere of a contemporary art installation rather than a traditional hotel reception. The guest rooms carry the same restrained palette — powder-blue walls, low-platform beds with near-black upholstered frames, warm oak desks and nightstands — kept deliberately calm against the visual energy of Midtown beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows. Downstairs, the bar moves in a contrasting direction entirely: exposed brick, wide-plank oak floors, pendant drop lights above a long mahogany counter, and turned-leg furniture that draws more from Lower East Side saloon than Midtown corporate.

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The Dominick

New York City • SoHo • SPLURGE

avg. $551 / night

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The Dominick Design Editorial

Rising 46 floors above the corner of Spring and Varick Streets, the glass curtain wall tower that houses The Dominick presented its architects — Costas Kondylis and Partners — with an interesting challenge when it opened in 2012: how to make a contemporary skyscraper feel at home in SoHo, a neighborhood whose character is defined almost entirely by cast-iron loft buildings that top out at six stories. The answer, visible in the images, was to anchor the tower behind a low-rise podium clad in warm zinc panels and floor-to-ceiling glass, creating a street-level mass that defers to the surrounding masonry before the blue-glazed shaft climbs sharply above it. From the upper floors, corner windows frame the Manhattan skyline northward toward the Empire State Building and westward across the Hudson to New Jersey, the city spread below in a way that makes the building's height feel like a deliberate gift rather than an imposition. Inside, the interiors carry the atmosphere of a well-tailored New York apartment rather than a conventional hotel. The double-height lobby — visible overhead in one image — layers bronze-patinated columns, warm walnut-tone vertical fins, and travertine floors under pendant lighting, the seating arranged in loose residential groupings of chocolate leather club chairs and low-slung sofas on silk-blend rugs. Guestrooms continue the restrained palette: deep espresso leather headboards spanning the full wall width, sand-toned carpet, and sheer linen curtains that dissolve into the view. The rooftop pool terrace, framed against SoHo's landmarked Art Deco warehouse facades, gives the property its most distinctive outdoor moment.

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Conrad New York Downtown

New York City • Tribeca • SPLURGE

avg. $580 / night

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Hilton Honors™ property

Conrad New York Downtown Design Editorial

At the southwestern edge of Lower Manhattan, where Battery Park City's landfill grid meets the Hudson River, a fourteen-storey red brick tower distinguished by a soaring central glass atrium has served as the address for Conrad New York Downtown since the hotel opened in 2012. The building, developed as part of the broader Battery Park City Authority plan, gives the property its most striking structural feature: that triangulated glass spine visible at the facade, glowing against the nighttime skyline with One World Trade Center rising behind it, situates the hotel firmly within the ambitious civic rebuilding of Lower Manhattan that followed September 2001. Inside, the 463 all-suite rooms follow a restrained contemporary brief — charcoal-stained millwork, slate-grey upholstered headboards in channel-tufted panels, cream lacquer nightstands, and cowhide-style rugs anchoring dark wood floors. The palette shifts subtly between room categories, with some configurations leaning into ebonized oak case goods against crisp white bedding, framed artwork providing the primary color notes. The restaurant, with its sculptural folded white ceiling planes angled above an open kitchen counter in polished concrete, carries more design ambition than the guest rooms suggest. The rooftop terrace, planted with low boxwood hedging and furnished with white resin chairs and generously cushioned banquettes in fuchsia and plum, offers unobstructed sight lines across the Hudson to the Jersey City skyline — a view that remains among the more quietly dramatic available from any hotel terrace in the city.

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The Bowery Hotel

New York City • Lower East Side • OVER THE TOP

avg. $689 / night

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The Bowery Hotel Design Editorial

Planted at the corner of Bowery and East Third Street, where Manhattan's most storied skid row was already mid-transformation when the hotel arrived in 2007, the red-brick tower that houses The Bowery Hotel was designed by Roman and Williams — the studio founded by Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch that would go on to define a certain strain of atmospheric American hotel design. The exterior presents as a building that has always been there: dark clinker brick, steel-framed industrial windows arranged in the grid language of early twentieth-century Manhattan warehouse construction, and a crowning water tower silhouette that could belong to 1920 as easily as today. Inside, Roman and Williams assembled rooms around an accumulation of found and antique elements rather than a singular decorative scheme — leather-upholstered headboards set into arched brick niches, ceiling fans above beamed tongue-and-groove ceilings, floral-printed curtains in heavy cotton, and Persian-style rugs that carry the warmth the whitewashed brick walls deliberately withhold. The ground-floor restaurant, Gemma, channels a kind of phantasmagoric Florentine taverna through wrought-iron chandeliers hung with exposed Edison bulbs, curved leather banquettes, dark-stained wood paneling, and arched back-bar shelving that manages to feel genuinely aged. A glass-roofed garden terrace furnished in terracotta-cushioned wicker and climbing ivy completes the atmosphere — somewhere between a European conservatory and a New York backyard, which is precisely the tension the whole property thrives on.

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The Chatwal

New York City • Midtown • OVER THE TOP

avg. $736 / night

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World of Hyatt property

The Chatwal Design Editorial

Stanford White designed the building at 130 West 44th Street in 1905 as the Lambs Club, a private theatrical fraternity whose members included Charlie Chaplin and Fred Astaire — a pedigree that gave The Chatwal, when it opened in 2012, one of the most storied addresses in Midtown Manhattan. thierry Despont handled the conversion, working within White's Beaux-Arts shell — its limestone colonnade, arched windows, and warm brick upper floors visible in the evening exterior — and threading 76 rooms through the landmarked structure with an Art Deco sensibility that honors the building's theatrical past without replicating it. The Lambs Club restaurant, retained as a separate venue on the ground floor, anchors the property's cultural identity as firmly as any design decision Despont made. Inside, the rooms carry a palette of sand, ivory, and deep navy, with wide-plank dark oak floors in the suites and vintage New York World's Fair posters lending the standard rooms a knowing period atmosphere rather than a period costume. Arne Jacobsen Swan chairs appear in the upper-category accommodations, their cobalt upholstery picking up the indigo throw across the bed. The Lambs Club dining room, visible in the images, deploys herringbone ebonized oak floors, red leather banquettes, polished chrome torchères, and a bar mirrored in smoky glass — Deco grammar executed with discipline. Beneath the hotel, the spa pool sits under a vaulted ceiling washed in blue light, large-format forest murals giving an unlikely stillness to a room four floors below West 44th Street.

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The Mercer

New York City • SoHo • OVER THE TOP

avg. $755 / night

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The Mercer Design Editorial

At the corner of Mercer and Prince Streets, a Romanesque Revival warehouse built in 1890 by John Kellum's successor firm has carried more lives than most SoHo buildings — dry goods merchant, artists' studios, loft conversions — before Christian Liaigre transformed it into The Mercer in 1998. The French designer's approach was to work with the building's industrial bones rather than soften them: whitewashed brick columns anchor the lobby, travertine slabs cover the floors, and the celebrated library lounge visible in the images deploys floor-to-ceiling walnut shelving packed with art books and curated volumes arranged loosely by color, the seating a studied mix of navy leather sofas, Liaigre's signature ebonized side tables, and slipcovered armchairs that give the whole room the atmosphere of a private member's library rather than a hotel reception. The 75 rooms across six floors follow the same considered restraint — bleached maple headboards set into recessed niches, sisal carpet underfoot, leather banquettes beneath the original tall-paned windows, and pendant lamps in a scale borrowed from Scandinavian modernism. The bar downstairs shifts register entirely: a steel-topped counter, dark lacquered stools, exposed brick, and cobalt-backlit shelving give it the compressed energy of a serious drinking room. Throughout, Liaigre maintained a consistent material logic — dark-stained oak, pale stone, unlacquered brass — that has aged more gracefully than almost any hotel interior of its era.

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Equinox Hotel Hudson Yards

New York City • Hudson Yards • OVER THE TOP

avg. $762 / night

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Equinox Hotel Hudson Yards Design Editorial

Fitness culture has rarely attempted a hotel quite like this one. When Equinox Hotel Hudson Yards opened in 2019 as the gym brand's first foray into hospitality, it set itself within SOM-designed Tower C at 33 Hudson Yards — a 24-storey structure clad in the warm travertine-toned stone visible in the images, its vertical fins giving the facade a rhythm that distinguishes it from the glass curtain walls rising on every side. The building's position adjacent to Thomas Heatherwick's Vessel and the Shed places it at the symbolic center of what was, at the time, the largest private real estate development in American history. Interiors by global design studio Parts and Labor Design translate Equinox's performance-first philosophy into 212 rooms and suites where the visual language is deliberately athletic rather than conventionally plush — dark leather platform beds, wide-plank oak floors, upholstered wall panels in pale linen, and in the suites, dramatic book-matched marble fireplace surrounds paired with floor-to-ceiling Manhattan views. The rooftop bar shown here makes the boldest material statement: a monumental backbar clad in swirling onyx panels, backlit to reveal the full depth of the stone's patterning, anchors a space that frames the Hudson Yards skyline as its primary decoration. The outdoor pool terrace, carved between the hotel's travertine facade and Heatherwick's copper lattice, gives the property an unlikely urban resort quality.

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The Carlyle, A Rosewood Hotel

New York City • Upper East Side • OVER THE TOP

avg. $820 / night

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The Carlyle, A Rosewood Hotel Design Editorial

Crowned by a patinated copper dome visible from well into Central Park, the thirty-five-floor Art Deco tower at 35 East 76th Street has anchored the Upper East Side skyline since Bien & Prince completed it in 1930. The Carlyle, as it became, carried a residential grandeur from the outset — its stepped limestone massing and intricate terracotta ornamental banding placing it closer to a grand Manhattan apartment building than a conventional hotel. Successive waves of renovation have preserved that register: the 190 rooms and suites carry walls painted in deep olive and warm taupe, upholstered headboards in pale linen set against chocolate-stained walnut millwork, and Greek key-patterned carpets in navy that ground the whole composition in a quietly patrician vocabulary. The public spaces hold the building's real character. Bemelmans Bar, named for Ludwig Bemelmans who painted its wraparound Central Park murals in 1947 in exchange for a year's lodging, survives with its gold-leaf ceiling and lacquered tabletops intact — one of the few mid-century hotel interiors in New York that has never been overtaken by renovation instinct. The restaurant, visible in the images with its densely hung salon-style picture walls, Baccarat-style crystal chandelier, and cognac leather banquettes, moves in a different register — more European grand café than Manhattan power room. Together the two spaces demonstrate what The Carlyle has always understood: that atmosphere accumulated over decades is harder to design than anything conceived from scratch.

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The Surrey, A Corinthia Hotel

New York City • Upper East Side • OVER THE TOP

avg. $879 / night

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The Surrey, A Corinthia Hotel Design Editorial

At 76th Street and Madison Avenue, where the Upper East Side settles into its most residential and self-assured register, a 1926 building by architects Bien & Prince has carried several identities over its nearly hundred-year life — apartment house, discreet hideaway for long-stay Manhattan regulars, and now, following a thorough reimagining by Corinthia Hotels, The Surrey in its most considered incarnation yet. The exterior facade, visible in the images, retains its limestone base and ornamental entry surround, the canopied porte-cochère framing a quietly ceremonial arrival that suits the neighborhood's understated confidence far better than any grander gesture would. Inside, the design work — led by Pierre-Yves Rochon, whose fingerprints are recognizable in the Calacatta marble lobby floor with its inlaid dark border, the lacquered ceiling panels, and the bronze-framed steel partition screens — navigates the central tension of the project with considerable skill: how to honor an Upper East Side building of genuine age and character without retreating into pastiche. The guestrooms answer in warm burl-wood nightstands, camel-toned upholstered headboards, arched brass-mounted mirrors, and swirling custom carpet patterns that carry an Art Deco sensibility without being period-literal. The bar moves in a more atmospheric direction entirely — dark-paneled walls, ribbed ceiling details, and large-format photography creating a room that belongs to late evening, amber light catching the backlit spirits shelf in a satisfyingly cinematic way. Across its 190 rooms and suites spread over seventeen floors, the hotel makes a persuasive case for grown-up Manhattan luxury.

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The Ritz-Carlton, Central Park - Image 1

The Ritz-Carlton, Central Park - Image 2

The Ritz-Carlton, Central Park - Image 3

The Ritz-Carlton, Central Park

New York City • Central Park • OVER THE TOP

avg. $894 / night

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Marriott Bonvoy® property

The Ritz-Carlton, Central Park Design Editorial

Facing the southeastern corner of Central Park from 50 Central Park South, the 1930 Italianate tower that houses The Ritz-Carlton New York, Central Park was designed by Schultz & Weaver — the same firm responsible for the original Waldorf Astoria and the Breakers Palm Beach — and its stepped limestone crown, visible above the park treeline in the exterior image, carries the authority of that lineage without the bombast. The building rises 26 floors above 59th Street, and the hotel's 259 rooms were refreshed under the direction of Frank Nicholson, whose palette draws from the park itself: warm stone, taupe, and the brown of mahogany woodwork. The guest rooms photographed here show coffered ceilings, dark-stained headboards set against veined marble wallcovering panels, and barrel-back lounge chairs in cognac leather arranged around marble-topped tables — decorative telescopes positioned at the windows as a nod to the park views immediately below. The Club Lounge carries the same mahogany millwork language, with chartreuse damask accent chairs and arched windows framing a green canopy of treetops. Most arresting is the bar, where a long Calacatta marble counter runs beneath a dark lacquered ceiling painted with bold white brushstrokes — a deliberately contemporary gesture that pulls the room forward from its classical envelope without abandoning it entirely.

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The Greenwich Hotel

New York City • Tribeca • OVER THE TOP

avg. $903 / night

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LHW Leaders Club property

The Greenwich Hotel Design Editorial

Salvaged timber from a 250-year-old Japanese farmhouse, reassembled beneath a TriBeCa street — it is hard to think of a more precise statement of intent for The Greenwich Hotel, the 88-room property that Robert De Niro developed with partners on North Moore Street and opened in 2008. The nine-storey brick building, its rounded corner bay and warm terracotta masonry sitting companionably among the neighbourhood's cast-iron loft buildings, was designed by Tihany Design, with interiors assembled more as a private collection than a hotel scheme. No two rooms are identical: some carry reclaimed barn-wood ceilings and deep sage walls with wingback chairs and herringbone-parquet floors, others trend toward cream plasterwork, dark-stained four-poster beds, tufted benches, and brass task lighting — the cumulative atmosphere closer to a well-travelled owner's townhouse than anything from a hospitality playbook. The Shibui Spa pool room, that extraordinary subterranean chamber framed by the reconstructed Japanese farmhouse structure, is the property's defining set piece — heavy darkwood beams on rope suspension, travertine surround, copper pendant lanterns casting amber light across still water. The restaurant, Locanda Verde, runs a more urban register: terracotta tile floors, raw-wood refectory tables, polished steel Tolix chairs, and exposed beam ceilings with backlit geometric screens, a downtown trattoria energy that keeps the ground floor from feeling like a hotel amenity. Together the spaces demonstrate a coherent if eclectic curatorial sensibility that rewards attention.

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The Whitby Hotel, Firmdale Hotels - Image 1

The Whitby Hotel, Firmdale Hotels - Image 2

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The Whitby Hotel, Firmdale Hotels

New York City • Upper Midtown • OVER THE TOP

avg. $948 / night

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The Whitby Hotel, Firmdale Hotels Design Editorial

Kit Kemp's conviction that a hotel room should feel like the inside of a very particular mind — curious, layered, unafraid of colour — finds perhaps its most fully realised expression in The Whitby Hotel, which opened on West 56th Street in 2017 as Firmdale's first purpose-built New York property. The facade, designed by Stephen Jacobs Group, steps back in a series of limestone-clad setbacks that nod to Manhattan's Midtown commercial vernacular while the steel-grid windows running floor to ceiling give each room the generous light of a proper loft. Forty-five floors compressed into an elegant mid-rise, housing 86 rooms and suites. Inside, Kemp's interiors deploy her signature technique of controlled collision: Mughal-arched headboards upholstered in scarlet block-print fabric against grey grasscloth walls, ochre silk wallcovering warmed by chinoiserie embroidery on lacquered navy, every room furnished as though assembled from a lifetime of obsessive collecting rather than a purchase order. The dining room gathers mismatched upholstered chairs — floral, geometric, shell-backed — beneath a tiered brass chandelier hung with frosted glass shades, walls lined with blue-and-white transferware plates above a marble pediment. At the bar, dozens of wicker baskets suspended from a steel grid overhead create an installation that functions as both ceiling and provocation, marble-top lattice stools and red leather lounge chairs arranged beneath. The cumulative effect is closer to a well-edited private house than any conventional idea of a New York hotel.

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Four Seasons New York Downtown - Image 1

Four Seasons New York Downtown - Image 2

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Four Seasons New York Downtown

New York City • Tribeca • OVER THE TOP

avg. $963 / night

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Four Seasons New York Downtown Design Editorial

Tribeca's gradual transformation from industrial warehouse district to one of Manhattan's most coveted addresses gave Four Seasons New York Downtown an unusual brief: to build a grand hotel from scratch in a neighborhood that had historically resisted that kind of institutional weight. Completed in 2016 within a purpose-built 38-storey tower designed by Pembrook Architects, the property brings 189 rooms to the lower end of the island, its limestone facade — visible in the images as a restrained classical composition with bronze entry doors and wrought iron balustrade detailing — deliberately understated against the more assertive glass towers nearby. The interiors, designed by Yabu Pushelberg, maintain the studio's characteristic restraint: guestrooms finished in warm greige and taupe, with smoked oak millwork carrying hairline brass reveals, geometric patterned carpets in grey and ivory, and framed gold-leaf artwork adding a quiet note of warmth. The pool level is the property's most atmospheric space, its columns clad in dramatically veined blue and silver marble — likely a fantastico or azul macauba variant — interspersed with Japanese shoji-inspired timber screens that filter the light into something meditative and still. Wolfgang Puck's CUT restaurant anchors the dining program, its entry corridor finished in figured dark walnut paneling with a crimson-lit bar as a focal point — a theatrical interior flourish that gives the otherwise tempered building its one moment of genuine drama.

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Soho House New York

New York City • Meatpacking District • OVER THE TOP

avg. $987 / night

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Soho House New York Design Editorial

Converted from a 1880s warehouse in the Meatpacking District, the building that houses Soho House New York carries the bones of its industrial past with deliberate honesty — exposed timber beams crossing whitewashed ceilings, original cast-iron columns left standing in the middle of guest rooms, and wide-plank hardwood floors worn to a patina that no decorating budget could replicate. When the members' club and hotel opened in 2003, founder Nick Jones applied the same curatorial instinct that had defined the London original: accumulate rather than decorate, layer rather than coordinate. The interiors mix ornately carved Baroque bed frames against stripped-back brick, tufted leather chesterfield ottomans beside crystal chandeliers, and freestanding roll-top baths positioned in open bedroom spaces as unselfconscious still-life objects. The rooftop pool — one of the first in Manhattan when it debuted — established a template that much of the city's hospitality industry subsequently chased, its purple-and-white striped loungers and checkerboard pool surround giving it a Riviera cadence several blocks from the Hudson. Downstairs, the Cowshed spa and the ground-floor bar anchor the building's public life: the bar in particular, with its long mahogany counter lined with red leather tub chairs, pressed-tin ceiling, and black-and-white checkered floor, carries the atmosphere of a saloon that has been running since the building was first raised, even if everything within it was assembled with considerable care.

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Crosby Street Hotel, Firmdale Hotels - Image 1

Crosby Street Hotel, Firmdale Hotels - Image 2

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Crosby Street Hotel, Firmdale Hotels

New York City • SoHo • OVER THE TOP

avg. $1,083 / night

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Crosby Street Hotel, Firmdale Hotels Design Editorial

Kit Kemp's conviction that a hotel room should feel like the most vivid version of someone's home — not a neutralised approximation of one — finds its fullest American expression at Crosby Street Hotel, which opened in SoHo in 2009 as Firmdale's first property outside London. The building, designed by architect Stephen Leung working with the Firmdale team, rises eleven floors above a cobblestoned stretch of Crosby Street, its facade combining warm brick and oversized steel-framed windows that carry the industrial register of the surrounding cast-iron district while letting light pour deep into the 86 rooms. Outside the entrance, a bronze panther sculpture by Hamish Mackie signals that the curatorial instincts at work inside begin at street level. Those instincts are impossible to miss once you're through the door. The double-height lobby, visible in the images, deploys wide-plank oak flooring, Jaume Plensa's letter-form head sculpture, and ikat-upholstered sofas against large-format abstract canvases in a composition that sits closer to a collector's loft than a hotel reception. Upstairs, each room carries its own colour world — orange-ground citrus-print wallpaper paired with a towering arched headboard in one; red-and-cream floral toile with a scarlet upholstered bedhead trimmed in mustard in another. The bar continues the chromatic intensity: green leather stools embossed with red birds, striped banquettes in primary colours, and a chandelier of woven globe pendants in every hue suspended above the zinc counter.

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Mandarin Oriental New York

New York City • Central Park • OVER THE TOP

avg. $1,131 / night

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Mandarin Oriental New York Design Editorial

At the southwestern corner of Columbus Circle, where Broadway and Eighth Avenue converge beneath Gaetano Russo's 1892 statue of Christopher Columbus, the twin glass towers of the Time Warner Center rise 750 feet above Midtown Manhattan — and it is within the taller of these two shafts, designed by David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and completed in 2003, that Mandarin Oriental New York claims floors 35 through 54. The positioning is the whole argument: 251 rooms and suites set at a height where Central Park spreads out below like a relief map, the Hudson visible beyond it on clear days, the Midtown skyline fanning east in both directions. Hirsch Bedner Associates handled the interiors, working in a register that favors dark-stained wood, travertine, and bronze-toned metalwork over anything that might read as exuberant. Guest rooms shown here carry that language through — quilted leather headboards framed within mirrored architectural surrounds, patterned wool carpets in amber and charcoal, the open bathroom arrangement that has become the brand's signature spatial move. The bar at the top of the building, visible in one image, has been updated with sinuous ceiling light installations and curved lounge seating in cream leather and graphite, Central Park glowing below through floor-to-ceiling glass. The lap pool, tiled in mosaic and lined with cobalt sun loungers, runs along a window wall with the midtown skyline as its backdrop — an amenity that only altitude makes possible.

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The Plaza, A Fairmont Managed Hotel - Image 1

The Plaza, A Fairmont Managed Hotel - Image 2

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The Plaza, A Fairmont Managed Hotel

New York City • Central Park • OVER THE TOP

avg. $1,724 / night

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ALL - Accor property

The Plaza, A Fairmont Managed Hotel Design Editorial

Few buildings in American civic life carry the symbolic weight of Henry Janeway Hardenbergh's 1907 French Renaissance château at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Central Park South. The Plaza has always been less a hotel than a fixed point in New York's self-image — the white-glazed brick and terracotta facade, its copper-green mansard roofline visible from the Pond in Central Park as clearly as from the street, functioning almost as a punctuation mark at the foot of Olmsted and Vaux's great park. The nineteen-story structure, designated a New York City landmark in 1969, underwent a major restoration and partial residential conversion completed in 2008, with Stonehill & Taylor overseeing the hotel interiors across 282 guest rooms and suites. The Palm Court remains the building's most architecturally irreplaceable space — a vaulted skylight ceiling, fluted Corinthian marble columns, and a Baccarat crystal chandelier of considerable scale, the room framed by potted palms in painted green jardinieres that have been a fixture here for over a century. Guest rooms show two registers: the more traditional suites deploy gilt-framed pier mirrors, Louis XVI-style commodes with ormolu mounts, and crystal sconces against white paneled walls, while the park-facing rooms adopt a softer contemporary palette of grey and warm taupe, lacquered ebonized credenzas with brass banding, and patterned drapes opening directly onto Central Park views. The lobby-level lounge, its coffered plasterwork ceiling hung with tiered crystal chandeliers above white marble floors, keeps the building's Beaux-Arts ambitions entirely intact.

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Ace Hotel Brooklyn

New York City • Brooklyn • SPLURGE

avg. $285 / night

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Ace Hotel Brooklyn Design Editorial

At 252 Schermerhorn Street in Downtown Brooklyn, a reinforced concrete frame that once housed a municipal building provided Roman and Williams with one of their most sympathetic raw materials — board-formed columns, exposed waffle-slab ceilings, and deep-set industrial windows that the studio left almost entirely untouched when Ace Hotel Brooklyn opened in 2021. The entry sequence sets the tone immediately: a forest of amber geometric pendants suspended through a double-height atrium alongside a black steel stair with orange-painted stringers, the whole composition hovering between a 1970s Japanese jazz bar and a Lower East Side loft that someone furnished very carefully over many years. Inside the 287 rooms, that sensibility becomes intimate rather than theatrical. Warm oak case goods with the proportions of midcentury Scandinavian workshop furniture anchor each space, striped textile armchairs and green leather sofas pulling against exposed concrete ceilings in a combination that feels genuinely residential. The lobby bar, framed between massive concrete piers and lined in warm-toned timber paneling, draws the eye toward a circular oculus window above the backbar — a detail that gives the room the atmosphere of a 1960s civic interior reborn as a neighborhood gathering place. In the restaurant, a grid of hand-glazed tiles in aquamarine, amber, and cream serves as a room divider, its scale and craft placing it closer to postwar Italian trattorias than anything conventionally hotel-like.

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The Hoxton, Williamsburg

New York City • Brooklyn • SPLURGE

avg. $361 / night

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The Hoxton, Williamsburg Design Editorial

Dropping into Williamsburg's Noord Seventh Street corridor in 2018, on a stretch where the East River industrial waterfront gives way to the neighborhood's denser residential grain, The Hoxton Williamsburg announced itself as a ten-storey new-build rather than the adaptive reuse that had defined the brand's earlier European properties. Hollwich Kushner — the New York practice known for buildings that negotiate between civic gesture and commercial program — designed the exterior: a dark metal-panel curtain wall cantilevered over a textured brick podium, the roofline articulated by retractable canvas awnings that are visible from street level and signal the rooftop bar above. The 175-room tower holds its own against the bridge view without grandstanding. Ennismore's in-house team handled the interiors, threading a palette of forest-green velvet headboards, brass sputnik pendants, dark walnut millwork, and graphic-print bedding through rooms that feel closer to a well-edited Brooklyn apartment than a branded hotel room. The open-grid clothing rack in blonde wood, the cast-bronze side table, and the low tulip-base bistro chairs at the window repeat across room categories with enough variation to avoid monotony. Downstairs, a glasshouse restaurant wrapped in mature ficus and living walls gives the ground-floor dining room a conservatory atmosphere, while the rooftop bar — yellow zellige tile behind the counter, cane bistro chairs facing the Williamsburg Bridge — delivers the panoramic payoff the building's height promises.

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Thompson Central Park New York, by Hyatt - Image 1

Thompson Central Park New York, by Hyatt - Image 2

Thompson Central Park New York, by Hyatt - Image 3

Thompson Central Park New York, by Hyatt

New York City • Central Park • SPLURGE

avg. $371 / night

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World of Hyatt property

Thompson Central Park New York, by Hyatt Design Editorial

Directly across from Central Park's southern edge, on West 56th Street where Midtown's commercial density gives way to the park's tree line, a 34-floor glass tower houses Thompson Central Park New York with an address that makes its design brief almost write itself: the views are the architecture. Rockwell Group handled the interiors, translating that advantage into rooms where floor-to-ceiling windows frame the park's canopy like a living canvas, the autumnal foliage visible in the images reducing every other decorative gesture to supporting cast. The 587 rooms are furnished in a palette of charcoal, warm oak, and brass — open black-steel shelving units double as room dividers and dressing tables, wall-mounted globe sconces in brushed brass providing the kind of considered residential lighting that most midtown hotels abandon in favour of overhead grids. The lobby and bar spaces make the stronger design argument. A double-height atrium lounge deploys indoor olive trees, navy velvet banquettes, and copper-toned pendant lights in a composition that carries more the atmosphere of a well-appointed private club than a hotel public room — a grand piano anchoring the far end signals intent clearly. The ground-floor bar takes a different register entirely: a long, darkened corridor of black millwork and green leather stools beneath a ceiling dense with trailing botanicals, the greenery overhead creating a compression and intimacy that the park-view rooms, for all their expansiveness, deliberately withhold.

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The William Vale

New York City • Brooklyn • SPLURGE

avg. $415 / night

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The William Vale Design Editorial

Planted at the edge of Williamsburg's low-rise grid like something dropped from a different city entirely, the tower designed by Aufgang Architects for The William Vale announces itself through its structural exoskeleton — massive V-shaped concrete columns flaring outward at the base, lifting the 23-story tower above a landscaped podium and lending the building a posture somewhere between brutalist confidence and contemporary spectacle. Opened in 2016 with 183 rooms, it was among the first hotels to take seriously the idea that Brooklyn's waterfront deserved architecture scaled to its Manhattan sightlines rather than its industrial past. Every room comes with a private balcony, which is the organizing logic behind the facade's rhythmic horizontal banding visible in the images — those deep concrete floor plates stepping back from the glass line to carve outdoor space into each guestroom. The interiors, handled by NDA (Nobutaka Ashihara Design Associates), keep a clean white and light-wood palette anchored by geometric-patterned rugs in charcoal and cream, with bursts of color from commissioned artwork hung above headboards. The rooftop bar Westlight makes the fullest argument for the tower's placement: a sweeping midtown panorama framed through full-height glazing, the room furnished in amber velvet banquettes, teal upholstered chairs, and bronze ceiling ribs from which globe pendants hang in loose clusters. The pool deck one floor below adds a resort register that still feels improbable in Williamsburg, though the Manhattan skyline glittering across the East River makes it make sense.

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The Roxy Hotel Tribeca

New York City • Tribeca • SPLURGE

avg. $431 / night

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The Roxy Hotel Tribeca Design Editorial

At the corner of West Broadway and White Street in lower Manhattan, where Tribeca's cast-iron warehouses give way to the wider streets of the Hudson Square edge, a red-brick building announced itself to the neighborhood in 2013 with a neon marquee and a sidewalk clock that could have been transplanted from a 1940s film set. The Roxy Hotel was developed by the Swig family and designed with interiors by Roman and Williams — the studio behind the Standard High Line and the Ace Hotel New York — who brought to the 201-room property the same studied romanticism that defines their best work: a deep literacy in American vernacular that stops well short of pastiche. The public spaces carry that sensibility most forcefully. The lobby bar features raw exposed brick, arched antiqued-mirror alcoves, a dark carved-wood back bar, and bentwood café chairs arranged around marble-topped tables — the atmosphere closer to a pre-Prohibition saloon than any conventional hotel lounge. The adjacent performance space fills a double-height brick volume furnished with tufted oxblood leather sofas, Chesterfield club chairs, and a live stage set permanently with guitars and a drum kit. Guest rooms work in warmer registers: dark-stained wide-plank oak floors, burnished copper-toned wall coverings, mid-century-inflected pendant fixtures, leather bed frames, and in the upper-floor suites, angled ceilings that lend the rooms an almost residential idiosyncrasy. Vinyl record players on brass-detailed credenzas complete the picture.

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PUBLIC Hotel

New York City • Lower East Side • SPLURGE

avg. $453 / night

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PUBLIC Hotel Design Editorial

Ian Schrager's long argument with luxury — that great design should not be the exclusive territory of expense accounts — found its most direct expression when PUBLIC Hotel opened on the Lower East Side in 2017. Designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the 367-room, 26-storey tower rises from Chrystie Street in board-formed concrete, its facade carrying the raw texture visible in the images through to the exposed ceilings inside every room. The exterior streetscape is dense with uplit hornbeam trees and clipped hedging that form a green wall along the pavement, giving the entrance a quality closer to a Manhattan garden than a hotel drop-off. Inside, the interiors split between two registers. Standard rooms are spare and warm — light ash wood cladding wraps walls and ceilings in a continuous timber shell, broken by the bare concrete soffit above and a marble-topped Saarinen-style side table below. Suites push toward something more atmospheric: amber candlelight, dark walnut headboard panels, a gilded baroque mirror set against stripped plaster. The rooftop bar frames the Empire State Building through a latticed bamboo canopy threaded with ivy, while the ground-floor bar beneath a suspended garden of hanging ferns — its backlit shelves stacked with vibrantly coloured infusion bottles — carries the theatrical instinct Schrager has applied to public spaces since his Studio 54 days, now channelled through the material rigour of one of architecture's most disciplined practices.

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The Mark Hotel

New York City • Central Park • OVER THE TOP

avg. $1,131 / night

Includes $60 / night in cash back

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I Prefer property

The Mark Hotel Design Editorial

Jacques Grange's 2009 reinvention of a 1927 Upper East Side landmark gave The Mark Hotel something few Manhattan properties can claim: a French decorator's sensibility applied to a building that already carried the bones of European classicism. The sixteen-floor brick tower on Madison Avenue and 77th Street, half a block from the Metropolitan Museum, had been a distinguished address since its neo-Italian Renaissance facade first rose above the neighborhood, and Grange — whose residential clients have included Yves Saint Laurent and Princess Caroline of Monaco — treated the renovation less as a hotel commission than as the assembly of an exceptionally large private apartment. The rooms bear this out. Tray ceilings with deep plaster moldings frame beds upholstered in channeled gray fabric, flanked by gourd-shaped brass lamps on cerused-oak nightstands and dressed in chartreuse silk drapes that pull the eye toward Madison Avenue's light. The palette across the 150 rooms and suites runs to warm stone, pewter, and acid yellow — a combination that feels Parisian without being imitative. The Mark Restaurant by Jean-Georges Vongerichten anchors the ground floor in two distinct registers: a bar room dressed in striped wool armchairs and warm terracotta tones, and a more formal dining room where walnut coffered ceilings, teal velvet banquettes, and abstract mid-century canvases mounted between polished brass grilles give the space the amber gravity of a classic French brasserie transported to the Fifth Avenue museum corridor.

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Four Seasons Hotel New York

New York City • Midtown • OVER THE TOP

avg. $1,895 / night

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Four Seasons Hotel New York Design Editorial

At 57th Street between Park and Madison, I.M. Pei's 52-storey limestone tower announced itself in 1993 as the tallest hotel in New York — a claim it held for years — and gave the Four Seasons Hotel New York a silhouette that remains one of Midtown's most considered pieces of commercial architecture. Pei brought the same classical restraint to this commission that had defined his East Wing at the National Gallery: the facade is dressed in Magny limestone, the fluted pilasters stepping the tower back in a series of setbacks that acknowledge the Art Deco grammar of the surrounding streetscape without literally quoting it. The entrance canopy visible from the street — a scalloped, fan-shaped bronze and frosted glass marquee — carries the period's confidence in ornamental metalwork without tipping into excess. Inside, the 368 rooms average over 600 square feet, among the most generous proportions of any Manhattan hotel, and the interiors designed by Chhada Siembieda carry a palette of honey-toned maple, pale woven carpet, and brushed steel that feels more like a well-appointed private apartment than conventional hotel accommodation. The restaurant space, where mature trees rise through a double-height volume amid deep green velvet seating and gold-washed walls, gives the ground floor a warmth that contradicts the tower's cool exterior logic. The bar, saturated in crimson leather and emperador dark marble, pulls in the opposite direction entirely — theatrical where the guest floors are serene.