New York's hippest hotels

From SoHo boho to literary chic, Hip Hotels author Herbert Ypma picks his five favourite New York hotels from his latest book.

The Mercer

SoHo is the only area in Manhattan without skyscrapers. The tallest buildings are a modest six storeys. These light-filled warehouses were once inhabited almost exclusively by industry.
A decade ago André Balazs, hotel impressario and owner of LA’s Chateau Marmont, acquired a red-brick building on the corner of Prince and Mercer Streets, in the heart of SoHo. The Mercer is the first hotel to offer a taste of “loft living”, an urban signature that is original to New York City. The conventional notion of a hotel room has been abandoned. Instead every room feels like a loft, with plenty of space and natural light — exactly what attracted the artists who first gave this area its distinctive character.
A loft demands a design approach that enhances rather than fills the space. That is why Balazs chose to work with Parisian designer Christian Liaigre. The combination of handsome, pared-down furniture in African wenge wood, neutrally toned textiles, simple lamps, dark wooden floors, pure white walls, crisp white linen, and a hint of lilac leather on elegant banquettes is exactly what was needed — a subtle, clean and classic approach that steers clear of furniture fashion.
The Mercer Kitchen, a restaurant in the basement, creates the feel of eating in the kitchen. The ambience and the cuisine of chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten has made the Mercer Kitchen one of the most consistent restaurants in SoHo. The matte-black crowd of ad agency staff, art directors, photographers and fashion people may have shunted out the artists, but SoHo still has an attitude you won’t find on the Upper East Side. For Nathan Silver, author of Lost New York:
‘If anything should stand forever as a radiant image of the essential New York, it ought to be these (SoHo’s) commercial buildings.” Continually evolving in response to contemporary needs, they are “the best and purest that New York has to offer”.
The Mercer, 147 Mercer Street, New York, NY 10012 (001 212 966 6060, http://www.mercerhotel.com/). Room rates from £250.

Soho House

The façade is small, the tiny reception is not even big enough to be called a lobby, and the text on the door is smaller than an Out to Lunch sign. It’s the reverse of the “come in we want to impress you” lobby. The message at Soho House is: “Go away we don’t want you . . . unless you’re a member.”
“Charming,” you say, “what kind of hotel is this?” And that’s the point. Soho House is not a hotel, it’s a private club — the hottest private club in New York — that happens to be a small hotel.
The rules are simple: if you are not a guest, you cannot eat in the restaurant, swim in the pool, lunch on the roof, drink in the bar, watch a film in the private-screening room or chill out in the Cowshed — the club’s spa — unless you’re a member.
Film directors, writers, artists, creative types make up the member roster, and yet Soho House is not painfully arty, either. It has struck a balance between cosy and trendy. Part of the credit goes to designer Ilse Crawford, who has brought a freedom to Soho House that goes beyond established notions of style. Traditional chesterfields share the same space with Saarinen tables, Italian lamps and Danish design classics. The look is a mix of laid-back modern and iconic antique, with the odd bit of bling.
Soho House, 29-35 Ninth Avenue, New York, NY 10014 (627 9800, http://www.sohohouseny.com/). Room rates from £230.

Hotel on Rivington

Situated bang in the middle of the Lower East Side, Hotel on Rivington is a study in contrast; a shiny glass and steel tower in a neighbourhood of dilapidated tenement buildings that once housed the highest density of immigrants in the world. One of the last “hoods” to relent to a property market that is always in seach of more affordable space, it differs from SoHo, TriBeCa, the Meatpacking District and Chelsea because there are no warehouses — only rows of skinny five and six-storey brick buildings.
Paul Stallings, one of the first property developers to grasp the neighbourhood’s potential, made the bold commitment to build a hotel from scratch, to create something not so much to “blend in” as to “fit in”. A team was found to come up with a creative programme that would mirror the street cred that defined the area. Dutch enfant terrible Marcel Wanders worked on the public spaces and French designer India Mahdavi created the guestrooms. Both were inspired choices: Mahdavi has made a name worldwide with timeless yet funky feminine furniture, while Wanders has proven, not without controversy, that removing the bourgeois concept of “good taste” is one of the only ways to move forward.
Less than a year after opening, almost all of New York has heard about the cave at the hotel entrance, the Thor restaurant is consistently voted in New York’s top 100, and the rooms are spacious. But the real advantage of the hotel came as a surprise to everyone, including the owners. There had never been a tower in this area, so no one knew that the hotel would have such an amazing view: New York’s skyline from a new perspective is a bonus for both guest and proprietor.
Hotel on Rivington, 107 Rivington Street, New York, NY 10002 (475 2600, http://www.hotelonrivington.com/). Room rates from £170.

Chambers

A trendy address with a downtown mentality — Chambers is a new kind of uptown hotel. The art consciousness that one would expect from SoHo or TriBeCa has been mixed with the more formal profile of a Fifth Avenue address. Situated a stone’s throw away from Fifth Avenue’s most glamorous boutique, Chambers is one of the most desirable Midtown areas, just below Central Park.
At first glance, the interior, a mix of tribal stools, velvet-clad contemporary design and serious art, seems out of place in a neighbourhood normally more comfortable with imitation French grandeur. Architect David Rockwell, a veteran of some very famous restaurant installations, was brought in to realise an interior to go with the art. For many hotels, art is an afterthought. At Chambers, art was the starting point. The owner of the hotel are serious collectors, and the property was intended as a rotating showcase for their collection. Larger works hang in the public spaces, smaller ones are featured in the guest rooms.
I have always been sceptical of the hotel as a gallery, but at Chambers it works because it reflects a genuine and intelligently conceived collection, and one that is constantly changing. During my stay, it consisted of contemporary artists from Asia: a fascinating mix of photography, painting, works on paper and sculpture.
With raw concrete ceilings, industrial lamps bolted to the walls, polished concrete bathroom floors and drafting tables with steel vintage work stools, the interiors are not what you would expect from a hotel around the corner from Tiffany’s. But that’s exactly why it works — a bit of edge between the poodles and the Bentleys is a good thing.


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Chambers, 15 West 56th Street, New York, NY 10019 (974 5656, http://www.chambershotel.com/). Room rates from £180.

Library Hotel

Books, books and more books. It’s an appropriate theme for a hotel situated on Library Way — the nickname for the stretch of 41st Street that leads to the New York Public Library and is paved with bronze plaques inscribed with quotations from some of the world’s most acclaimed writers.
The Library is the first hotel to base itself entirely on books. The small lobby is framed by bookshelves and the reception desk is designed as a faux card catalogue that could once have housed library index cards. The second-floor lounge where breakfast is served is lined with bookcases.
The rooftop bar, a beautiful space that could double as Cary Grant’s penthouse in a stylish pre-war New York film, is called Bookmarks, and features the dark, moody area known as the Writer’s Den and the poetry garden, as well as the outside terraces.
Rooms use the traditional library classification code of the Dewey Decimal System, so that there are no numbers or names. For example, the fourth floor is classified as Languages, and my room was labelled 400.006. Ancient Languages. In my room the shelves were full of books on ancient languages.
It makes a change from the same magazines most New York hotels place in their rooms. The Library is a cosy, clubby hotel near the New York Public Library, as well as Grand Central Station.
Library Hotel, 229 Madison Avenue at 41st Street, New York, NY 10017 (983 4500, http://www.libraryhotel.com/). Room rates from £180.

New York Hip Hotels by Herbert Ypma (Thames & Hudson, £12.95); see http://www.hiphotels.com/. Copies can be ordered for the BooksFirst price of £11.66 (free p&p) from 0870 1608080, http://www.booksfirst.co.uk/.