Beautiful Hotels in NYC

Every room keeps a working rotary telephone with a direct line to reception, and the number is 22. R. H. Robertson drew the building in 1891 as the Margaret Louisa Home, a Romanesque Revival residence off Union Square that Margaret Louisa Vanderbilt Shepard funded with the YWCA for self-supporting women looking for work. BKSK carried six floors to nine across eighty thousand square feet, reconstructed the carved sandstone stripped from street level in the 1950s, and raised the gable Robertson had drawn and never got, this time in glass screened behind cast concrete. Griffins sit over the door. London's Child Studio, run by Alexy Kos and Che Huang, worked the 76 keys in mahogany and herringbone parquet, with canopy beds, kidney-shaped writing desks and walk-in wardrobes among European antiques and art from dealers nearby. Nineteen are suites, each held to a single register of color, burgundy or ink or caramel or ivory. The one at the top runs a thousand square feet under a pitched ceiling, its living room painted overhead with the private gardens at Gramercy Park. Calacatta marble bathrooms leave the sink pipes exposed and gilded. The club above keeps its own rooms: a living room carpeted in leopard print after Madeleine Castaing, with a stone fireplace from the 19th century; a members' restaurant anchored by a four-metre Keith Haring spray work from the owner's collection; a rooftop bar draped like a Napoleonic tent. The top suite comes with house breakfast, a butler, the pressing of three items and the living room until six. Every stay carries Temporary Patron standing for its duration. The club keeps its own list.

The ground floor holds a dark, spa-quiet room on the 57th Street side, a few chairs and some dark-leaved plants in it, and two lifts. The lobby is fourteen floors up. Warren and Wetmore put the Crown Building up for August Heckscher between 1920 and 1922, French Renaissance over a nine-story base, an octagonal tower under a steep pyramid roof, and a gold-plated rooster turning on top of it until 1942, when it came down for the war's scrap drives. The Museum of Modern Art opened in six rooms on the twelfth floor in November 1929 and stayed until 1932. Douglas Leigh gilded and lit the crown in 1983, and the city landmarked the building in 2024. The restoration Jean-Michel Gathy began in 2017 opened in August 2022, leaving 83 suites on the floors below the lobby, the smallest around 718 square feet and none of them without a working fireplace. Ceilings reach nearly eleven feet over oak and walnut, bronze and blackened steel. Backlit rice paper panels sit inside pivoting louvre doors that shut the bath and its free-standing oval tub off from the bedroom. One of the Homes opens onto a terrace with an infinity pool facing Central Park. A butler comes with every stay. The lobby runs double height, Peter Gentenaar's paper and bamboo sculptures hanging between four stone columns, and off it a wraparound terrace of 7,000 square feet sets a circular fire pit inside a square reflecting pool. A retractable glass roof keeps it open all year. Below, the spa takes three floors and 25,000 square feet, a hammam and a banya in two private houses beside a 65-foot pool, and the jazz club runs deeper still, the one room here that admits anyone. It is underground.

Every room holds a set of Ojas speakers and amplifiers built to order, tuned to four New York stations that Devon Turnbull and the DJ Stretch Armstrong put together. Books from Sweet Pickle Books on Orchard Street sit on the shelves and in the desks. Reza Nouranian furnished the 113 rooms with the Los Angeles gallerist Ray Azoulay, setting mustard bouclé armchairs and antique French desks against chrome chairs out of the 1970s, hanging nearly every wall with work by a New York artist, and taking the headboards and round ceramic lamps from BDDW in SoHo. Corner Kings look out through curved corner windows, the Orchard Loft suites wrap uptown toward the Empire State Building, and three suites open onto brick terraces. The minibar holds snacks from Dimes and a folded map of the blocks outside. Sender Jarmulowsky founded the bank in 1873 to hold the savings of Lower East Side immigrants and rehoused it in 1912 in a twelve-story Beaux-Arts tower by Rouse & Goldstone, two years before depositors emptied their accounts to send the money to relatives in Europe and the bank went under. The dome that crowned the corner, ringed with eagles and modeled on the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, came off in 1990, and a replica went back up in 2020. Studio Castellano and the architectural historian Kerri Culhane spent a decade on the restoration, working off the 1912 drawings and what photographs survived. It opened as a hotel in June 2022. The old banking hall, coffered overhead and floored in pink Tennessee marble, is the Swan Room now, and the Austin group MML Hospitality took the building on in 2025 with its three restaurants included. Coffee and pastry go out every morning, wine at five midweek, and jazz some evenings. The gym never closes.

Celebrated as a beacon of glamour since its 1931 debut, the Waldorf Astoria New York embodies the spirit of sophisticated New York living with its storied Art Deco architecture and richly restored interiors. Legendary ballrooms and the famed Peacock Alley recall an era when Hollywood stars, world leaders, and cultural icons mingled under gilded ceilings, while culinary history was made with the invention of dishes like the Waldorf Salad and Eggs Benedict. Meticulously reimagined for the modern age, the hotel’s re-opening unveils opulent rooms, world-class dining, and a best-in-class spa—allowing guests to experience both the romance of the past and the luxuries of today. Every detail, from the preservation of historic artifacts to the chic contemporary furnishings, makes the Waldorf Astoria an enduring symbol of New York’s prestige and allure.

Set within the limestone-and-glass tower of 35 Hudson Yards, the Equinox Hotel New York redefines wellness luxury through architecture and design. Interiors by Rockwell Group and Joyce Wang Studio balance high performance with restorative calm. Guest rooms are conceived as quiet “sleep chambers,” with blackout shades, sound-insulating details, and calibrated lighting that foster deep rest. Wellness amenities are expansive: a 60,000-square-foot Equinox fitness club, an indoor saltwater pool, and an outdoor pool deck overlooking the Hudson River. A full-scale spa with cryotherapy chambers, infrared saunas, and integrated recovery treatments extends the brand’s performance-driven ethos. Dining is anchored by Electric Lemon, a Stephen Starr restaurant serving seasonal American cuisine from a soaring dining room and an 8,000-square-foot landscaped terrace—complete with reflecting pool, art installations, and sweeping views of the city. Every detail channels modern vitality and equilibrium, positioning the Equinox Hotel as a flagship destination where design, fitness, and hospitality converge in New York City.

The ground floor is still a working ferry terminal, and the boats to Governors Island load below while the hotel keeps its own porte-cochere and lobbies off the side. Upstairs, the harbor is the whole view. Walker and Morris finished the Battery Maritime Building in 1909, a Beaux-Arts ferry house in iron and copper that the city landmarked in 1967 and that spent later decades holding municipal paperwork. In the conversion completed in 2021, Marvel rebuilt the third and fourth floors into guestrooms and set a glass addition on the water-facing elevation to carry the club above, with Thierry Despont's office taking the interiors. Of the Great Hall's 130-foot glass laylight only a failing steel grid had survived, so the pattern was drawn back from old photographs. Twenty-eight rooms and nineteen suites fill those two floors, finished in custom Italian mahogany with marble bathrooms, walk-in wardrobes and Art Deco in the detailing, and turned toward the East River, the Brooklyn Bridge or the Statue of Liberty. Many suites open onto private terraces set under pergolas, and on the Garden Suite the patio is larger than the suite, 807 square feet against 755. The two Presidential Suites, Roebling and Bartholdi, carry wraparound terraces and Loro Piana interiors. A room key opens the club and the wellness floors for the length of the stay, access that is otherwise a matter of membership. The house car runs drop-offs within twelve blocks, shoes are shined daily, and the Times or the Journal arrives with the morning. The boats keep leaving below.

The window glass bows outward where the guest rooms are, a bay window redrawn at tower scale, and between the bays the facade turns opaque and curves back the other way to bury the columns. The view arrives curved rather than flat. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill drew the tower for Brookfield's Manhattan West, the eight-acre block running from Ninth to Tenth beside Moynihan Train Hall, wrapping the lower floors and the bands between windows in black striated granite that follows every curve. Twenty-one stories reach 272 feet on a site of 8,200 square feet, and just 22 percent of the curtain wall panels had to be bent at all, three radii generating the whole shape. It opened in September 2021, the brand's fifth hotel and its first in New York. Gachot Studios took the West Coast Light and Space artists of the sixties and seventies as the reference for the 164 rooms, thirty of them suites, working a neutral palette of white linens and wood against floor-to-ceiling glass on one wall and marble in the bath. The one-bedroom Pendry Suite, 1,265 square feet on the twenty-first floor, keeps a Steinway, a Taylor acoustic and a Bowers & Wilkins turntable in a living room with a fireplace, records included. The dining table seats eight. Nancy Lorenz built the commissioned wall installation that anchors Bar Pendry off the lobby, worked in gold leaf, lacquer and mother-of-pearl so the low light has something to move across. John Wigmore's white Moriki collage panels stand at the entrance to the Garden Room, translucent enough to glow. Elsewhere the hotel carries 6,000 square feet of event space and a 1,700-square-foot fitness center whose Movement Studio is set aside for stretching and yoga. The reference is California, the address is not.

The toile in the rooms was drawn for this building alone, and it plays loose with the map: the Ladder 8 firehouse turns up beside Greene Street, and a pigeon somewhere in the pattern is making off with a croissant. None of it is salvage: the eight stories went up new inside the Tribeca North Historic District, a joint venture between Groupe Barrière and the developer Caspi Development that opened in September 2022, with SBJ Group setting the brick, stone and cast iron of its neighbors against metal screening and an aluminum panel system. The entrance is easy to walk past. Martin Brudnizki ran the interiors toward lavender and almond green, Art Deco furniture, mohair velvet and deep walnut, and gave the ground floor a lobby with nooks to sit in. It is closer to a domestic lounge than a check-in hall. The toile runs through all 97 keys, 65 of them king rooms and 29 corner or terrace suites, and the bathrooms are marble with rain showers. Windows go floor to ceiling at the prestige tier, where the suites add parquet and Calacatta marble. One of the terrace suites opens onto five hundred square feet of outdoor room, over the nineteenth-century brick of the neighborhood. The penthouse holds the top two floors. A cinema called Cannes takes private bookings and runs ticketed screenings by season, and the spa holds five treatment rooms, an indoor pool, a sauna and a steam room. Le Vaux, the rooftop, is members and room keys only, three visitors to a key, its motifs taken from the château at Vaux-le-Vicomte. The season is short.

Most tower rooms look out over Central Park, and in the redrawn rooms the wallpaper carries illustrated vignettes of it, so the park arrives twice. Pianos sit in many of the suites. Sylvan Bien and Harry M. Prince designed the Art Deco tower that opened on East 76th Street in November 1930, its interiors by Dorothy Draper, and Rosewood has run it since 2001. Privately owned apartments occupy part of the building alongside the guest floors. Not everyone here is a guest. William Paley of tonychi studio redrew 155 rooms and suites in black lacquered panelling and that illustrated wallpaper, both drawn from Ludwig Bemelmans and Marcel Vertes. The Carlyle Suites take the corner over Madison Avenue and 76th Street, hardwood underfoot, with a large dressing area and Art Deco touches kept modern. The rest stayed in other hands, Thierry Despont and Dan Fink among them. Despont's Empire Suite runs as a duplex over the 28th and 29th floors, floor-to-ceiling windows on the park, while the Presidential Suite takes the 26th whole, reached through a private elevator landing worked in gold leaf and hand-etched Art Deco murals, a piano standing in its gallery entrance. The signature suites come with a Suite Ambassador. A Valmont spa and the Yves Durif salon work out of the building, and downstairs the Gallery serves afternoon tea in a jewel box Renzo Mongiardino drew from Topkapi Palace. Ludwig Bemelmans painted the murals in the bar that carries his name, and both rooms are still working. Ninety-odd years in.

Set along the High Line in West Chelsea, Faena New York invites guests into a dazzling urban sanctuary where bold design and cultural vibrancy converge. Every detail is meticulously curated, from Peter Mikic’s sumptuous interiors and Diego Gravinese’s cerebral murals to breathtaking views of the Empire State Building and Hudson River—each suite is a unique masterpiece of comfort and style. Culinary artistry shines at La Boca, helmed by Francis Mallmann, while the Tierra Santa Healing House spa and immersive event spaces enrich the experience with a sense of creative community and indulgence. The hotel’s soaring architecture, signature golden staircase, and world-class art program transform every moment into an inspiring celebration of modern luxury.