The Mark Hotel

Schwartz and Gross drew the sixteen floors at Madison and 77th, and the building opened in 1927 as the Hyde Park Hotel, an apartment hotel. Izak Senbahar and Simon Elias bought it from Mandarin Oriental in 2006 and handed the interiors to Jacques Grange, who worked through the Paris dealer Pierre Passebon to commission custom pieces from Ron Arad, Vladimir Kagan, Mattia Bonetti and Karl Lagerfeld. Grange laid the lobby in black and white striped marble.

The 106 rooms run 400 to 500 square feet and look onto Madison, East 77th or the townhouse gardens behind, furnished by Grange in ebony, sycamore and nickel, with a black granite bar holding a Sub-Zero and a black and white marble bath fitted in polished nickel by Lefroy Brooks. The 47 suites begin at 700 square feet and climb past the fourteenth-floor terraces to The Mark Penthouse, ten thousand square feet on the sixteenth. The roof terrace up there faces Central Park.

A model sailboat of the hotel's own design waits at the Kerbs Memorial Boathouse on the Conservatory Water, thirty minutes at a time. The stripes leave the building as well, running across the canopies of the pedicabs, around the chain cases of the bikes lent to guests, and down the sides of the hot dog cart outside the door, where the menu is Jean-Georges' and the relish is kimchi. A hot dog is six dollars.