The Ritz-Carlton New York, Central Park

Emery Roth put the building up in 1930 as the St. Moritz, thirty-three stories of light-brown sandstone on a rusticated base, finished with a red tile roof and a small globe, on ground the New York Athletic Club had vacated. Millennium Partners reopened it under the Ritz-Carlton name in 2002, leaving the hotel on the lower floors and cutting eleven condominiums out of the top twelve. Rumpelmayer's had the park-facing windows at street level, from 1930 until the hotel closed.

Gilles & Boissier redrew all 253 rooms, 47 of them suites, in ecru shot through with pink taken from the skyline after sunset, inlaying a Matisse sketch into the carpets and papering the walls in Fornasetti clouds, with Rodney Smith's black-and-white photographs hung against the Beaux Arts detailing. The Artists' Gate Suite adds a billiards room behind thirteen windows.

Contour runs through three rooms downstairs, the fluid line across its bar ceiling being what gave the place its name. The Club Lounge, wood-paneled on the second floor, opens on breakfast and closes on evening hors d'oeuvres, and the La Prairie spa keeps six treatment rooms, the only ones the Swiss house runs in the Northeast. The park starts at the curb.