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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