The Connaught

The staircase that climbs out of the lobby was copied for Ralph Lauren's Madison Avenue flagship. It belongs to a building put up between 1894 and 1897 as the Coburg, on the site of the Georgian houses in Charles Street that had served as the hotel since 1815, after the Duke of Westminster redrew that street into Carlos Place. The name changed during the First World War, to Queen Victoria's son Arthur, Duke of Connaught. The bar overlooking Carlos Place kept the old one.

There are three bars, not counting the Champagne Room. The Connaught Bar, platinum silver leaf on the walls and a 1920s Cubist look to the scheme David Collins Studio drew for it, has been open since 2008, takes no reservations, and builds its martini off a trolley set with the makings and a rank of bitters, on a gin blended for the house. Through a velvet curtain off the Champagne Room, the Red Room keeps a pink onyx bar and Louise Bourgeois's I Am Rouge. The Coburg pours whisky from nine in the morning.

Hélène Darroze has cooked here since 2008, to menus built on producers she has worked with for decades. Down a corridor clad in rosewood, the Connaught Grill grills over hardwood charcoal and apple wood embers in an open kitchen, carves the Sunday joint off a silver trolley and finishes the crêpes suzette in flame at the table. Jean-Georges Vongerichten shaped it, and his name is on the room facing Mount Street.

An Aman spa holds five treatment rooms, a pool and a steam room inside the building, and a butler comes with every room. Downstairs, little else needs a room key.