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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In white daylight, rainbows cascading, a spectrum of swatches cast from a trillion facets. By night, dimmed shimmer and champagne flutes. Gem-red spheres of fresh roses. THIS IS BACCARAT.