The Greenwich Hotel

It opened in 2008 on the corner of Greenwich and North Moore, built from the ground up over a parking lot, with a lobby floor of terracotta and marble that a family of Italian artisans hand-molded to copy the flooring of a fourteenth-century palazzo. Abstract paintings by Robert De Niro Sr., who studied under Josef Albers at Black Mountain College, hang there. Past them a drawing room of bookshelves and a wood-burning fireplace opens onto a courtyard of potted plants set in red brick. Neither is public.

Siberian oak floors run under Tibetan silk and antique rugs, and French doors on some rooms give onto a Juliet balcony over the courtyard or a floor-to-ceiling view of the Hudson. Bathrooms come in hand-laid Moroccan tile or Carrara marble, and the suites add a stone fireplace and a wet bar. Axel Vervoordt and Tatsuro Miki drew the penthouse across the top two floors around the Japanese idea of wabi, 2,800 square feet inside and 4,000 out on the terrace. No two rooms are alike.

A house car handles short trips downtown, and the minibar is free, stocked with what the management picks, Uncle Jerry's Pennsylvania Dutch pretzels among them. Andrew Carmellini's Locanda Verde is high-ceilinged and open to the street, while below ground the heated pool sits under lanterns inside a 250-year-old farmhouse shipped from Kyoto and rebuilt with wooden pegs and knotted rope in place of nails. From the street, nothing shows.