The Twenty Two New York

R. H. Robertson drew the building in 1891 as the Margaret Louisa Home, a Romanesque Revival residence off Union Square that Margaret Louisa Vanderbilt Shepard funded with the YWCA for self-supporting women looking for work. BKSK carried six floors to nine across eighty thousand square feet, reconstructed the carved sandstone stripped from street level in the 1950s, and raised the gable Robertson had drawn and never got, this time in glass screened behind cast concrete. Griffins sit over the door.

London's Child Studio, run by Alexy Kos and Che Huang, worked the 76 keys in mahogany and herringbone parquet, with canopy beds, kidney-shaped writing desks and walk-in wardrobes among European antiques and art from dealers nearby. Nineteen are suites, each held to a single register of color, burgundy or ink or caramel or ivory. The one at the top runs a thousand square feet under a pitched ceiling, its living room painted overhead with the private gardens at Gramercy Park. Calacatta marble bathrooms leave the sink pipes exposed and gilded.

The club above keeps its own rooms: a living room carpeted in leopard print after Madeleine Castaing, with a stone fireplace from the 19th century; a members' restaurant anchored by a four-metre Keith Haring spray work from the owner's collection; a rooftop bar draped like a Napoleonic tent.

The top suite comes with house breakfast, a butler, the pressing of three items and the living room until six. Every stay carries Temporary Patron standing for its duration. The club keeps its own list.