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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