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.

No travel notes provided yet.

No description provided yet.