The Fifth Avenue Hotel

Two buildings share the address. Charlotte Goodridge held a mansion on this corner through the Gilded Age, and McKim, Mead & White put up a brick and limestone palazzo here in 1907 for the Second National Bank, which now carries a 230-foot glass tower on its back by Perkins Eastman and PBDW. Twenty-four of the 153 rooms sit in the old bank, still called the Mansion. The rest are in the tower.

Martin Brudnizki Design Studio took the interiors into garden green, buttercup yellow and peony pink, hanging Murano glass chandeliers and building wardrobes on the lines of Chinese cabinets, with rose silk in the elevator lobbies. The chandelier over the bed in a Mansion suite is a cluster of small glass fruit. Bathrooms are marble, beds Italian linen.

Charles Baudelaire is the house patron, and Michael Mapes built a portrait of him in 2023 out of postage stamps, buttons, insects, glass vials, pressed flowers and quills. Photographs by Gordon Parks, William Klein and Melvyn Sokolsky hang in the rooms, chosen by Leslie Simitch of Trunk Archive.

The rituals run on request through the in-suite tablet. A butler wheels in the tea cart through the afternoon, a sculptural hourglass set on the table, and comes back in the evening to mix two martinis in the room. Very little requires leaving.