Urban chic at the Ace Hotel: a microcosm
of contemporary New York City.

This year, New York has seen the opening of an astonishing amount of five-star deluxe properties: two Andaz hotels, a new W, a new Gansevoort, an Intercontinental, the Trump Soho, and the Chatwal. Each property is attempting to bring more to the city than just a decent square footage of bedroom with an en suite. In an echo of the 1920s, when New York social life revolved almost exclusively around hotels, these new – or in some cases reinvented – properties are cultural magnets for tourists and locals alike. They raise the bar, make headline news and reinvent whole districts.

A wealth of options on Wall Street The new Andaz and W hotels that opened this year are integral to the rejuvenation of the financial district. The Andaz Wall Street is one of the finest and most progressive hotels in the city – complimentary minibars and WiFi come as standard, and the rooms are immense in size. Instead of a TV shoved against a wall, there’s an island work station that enhances the feeling of space.

The BLT Bar & Grill at the new W a few blocks away is, perhaps, the best restaurant in the neighbourhood, serving refined but muscular comfort food: filet mignon and macaroni and comté gratin among others. It’s all done so perfectly, and is a blessing for the hedge funders who recently snapped up real estate in the area.

Meatpacking boutiques and beyond Just as the Meatpacking District (or MePa, as some are determined to call it) seemed to have peaked, André Balazs’s The Standard developed a spectrum of intense social scenes this year and rebooted it.

From its beer garden to offbeat bingo nights, Balazs creates buzz after buzz. He also continues to court notoriety. Although The Standard has stopped actively encouraging exhibitionism by its guests in glass-fronted bedrooms overlooking the new public High Line park space, the New York Post’s website still has a gallery of past peep show escapades. Far away from the velvet ropes of the Meatpacking District, the Ace Hotel, which has its spiritual home in the indie-rock hipster milieu of Portland Oregon, is anything but a slouch. Think of it as a Chelsea Hotel for the ambition-driven 21st century.

Along with urban art in the lobby and the industrial-chic utilitarian bedrooms, the Ace has imported the Stumptown Coffee crew. That line that you see snaking out of the door and along West 29th Street every morning is for the best latte in the country, served by bearded, tattooed, flat-cap wearing boys in braces. There was a time when genuine downtown hotels were a rarity. When the Soho Grand opened in 1996, it was almost shocking to be able to bed down between the lofts and galleries. Now the area is infested with boutique properties alongside Banana Republic, J Crew and Apple.

The Soho Grand’s designer, William Sofield, who also works regularly for Tom Ford, remembers that it was a difficult as well as radical addition to the area. ‘There was a lot of resistance to development in the neighbourhood,’ he says.

‘But people were relieved when we opened. We respected the roots of what was unique to the neighbourhood, incorporating the works of local artists and artisans.’

The industrial-plush bent of the interior, including the Grand Street sidewalks’ round-glass tiling, has always been in sync with SoHo and, this summer, Sofield returned to create a sumptuous Club Room and a floor of masculine, plush suites, with cine-screen Macs and coffee tables made from recycled newspaper. The hotel has never slipped off the cultural radar for festivals and, in particular, Fashion Week parties.

‘The paramount rule in my book is to create something that has a legacy,’ says Sofield. Daring design The new Manhattan hotel scene is radically different from the Ian Schrager era, when your room was the size of a postage stamp and you couldn’t actually visit the bar in your own hotel because of a private event. There’s too much choice out there for that to have remained the status quo. It’s now all about rooftop pools, shopping, public bars and restaurants.

Celebrity chef Todd English’s August opening at the new Intercontinental on Times Square, Ça Va, is his best kitchen yet, with a confident American take on classic brasserie fare, such as roasted lamb ‘French dip’ that appears burger-like, with a side order of mildly-curried potato chips.

At the same time, the best ultra-finedining restaurants in the city are within the confines of the most polished hotels. The two Michelin-starred GILT at the New York Palace Hotel is housed within the most imposing wood-panelled room of the old Villard Mansion, and Justin Bogle’s degustation menu represents the city’s most reliable excuse to dress up for dinner. Meanwhile, taking a kitchen-counter seat at the Manhattan outpost of L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon, on the second floor of the Four Seasons, is to be ringside for the finest chefs in action in the city.

Keith McNally may be able to command a hipper, impossible-to-book scene downtown, but the food within the classic, I.M. Pei-designed Four Seasons is superlative – you’ll know and worship the burger and the butter-rich potato emulsion already from London and Tokyo, so try the sea bass with lemongrass foam and amadai in yuzu broth. Then, of course, there’s Adour at the St Regis, still the most enjoyable, sophisticated but relaxed dining experience in the Ducasse empire.

Many of the best hotel dining experiences replicate or interpret European classics, but it’s always refracted through a New York lens. Upper East Side native Tony Chi may well be the most Manhattan of hotel and restaurant designers, and certainly one of the most prolific. His designs for the new Andaz 5th Avenue, opposite the iconic New York Public Library, are typically clean, with high ceilings, huge windows and modernist expanses of uninterrupted surface. His design for Asiate at the Mandarin Oriental – still one of the most consistently impressive Asian-fusion restaurants anywhere – treats the Central Park South vista as an opera, and the dining tables as a cloud-level dress circle. ‘I’m trying to make design less visible,’ says Chi. ‘Invisible design is what touches you rather than what you see.’

Susanne Bartsch, boutique owner,
Manhattan socialite.

WALK ON THE WILD SIDE
"I love wandering around Chelsea, hopping from gallery to gallery, and I love the offbeat movie theatres, like the Angelika Film Center on West Houston Street, and the Sunshine Cinema on the Lower East Side. When I’m shopping for clothes, I like to go to sample sales and flea markets. I like Bond Street, which has a lot of new stores, including Daryl K. For food, the Standard Grill in the Meatpacking District is really good, and I love the Swiss décor and the fondue at Café Select on Lafayette Street. After all, I am Swiss you know!"

Contemporary vintage
If there’s one style that continues to define Manhattan, it’s Art Deco. New York City as we know it was invented in the 1920s and 1930s, when industrialists forged it with ego-driven skyscrapers, gilt and streamlined marble lobbies. Some of the newest hotel projects are a sensitive update on the look, each of them with the sheen and glow of a beautifully crafted jewel box. The Chatwal recently opened within the chaos of Times Square and the theatre district; its lobby is reminiscent of a fin-desiècle ocean liner, and the fittings in its rooms echo vintage fine leather steamer trunks.

The Mark hotel on the Upper East Side recently reopened after refurbishment by Jacques Grange – famous for his work for YSL and Pierre Bergé.

It’s an exquisite experience, with black and white striped marble bathrooms and lobby, and a Jean- Georges Vongerichten dining room incandescent with glamour. Impeccably coiffed old money and visiting celebrities tuck nightly into refined versions of steak house classics and Grand Marnier soufflé.

A short stroll away, Le Caprice has set a radically different visual pace for the reopened Taj Pierre hotel. Step away from the Italianate trompe l’oeil lobby and into the bold monochrome outpost of the London original.

The transition is as dramatic as a scene from Peter Greenaway’s The Cook The Thief; the new room is cool and long, with shiny black walls and David Bailey photo flourishes from the 1960s.

Eating fish and chips after a dry martini with a plate of Pimm’s jelly to follow at Le Caprice might be a quintessentially London experience, but here on Central Park, surrounded by Condé Nast fashion editors and society grand dames, it becomes quintessentially Manhattan. And that’s the magic of the best hotels in New York – you can’t get that high-gloss, dynamic Gotham feeling anywhere else in the world.