The Wall Street Hotel

The Beaux-Arts block at 88 Wall Street went up in 1902, on ground the Tontine Coffee House had held since the 1790s as the Stock Exchange's first home. Allan Gerdau ran the largest mother-of-pearl import business in the world out of the building for decades, and the Australian family shipping him the shell was the Paspaleys, who bought his estate in 1989 and found the building in it. Three decades passed before they decided what to make of it.

Rose Ink Workshop dressed the 180 rooms as apartments rather than hotel rooms, in greys and blues, with pearl-shell motifs across the headboards and curtains and carpets drawn from oyster nets. Works commissioned from the APY Art Centre Collective in South Australia hang in the guestrooms and the public rooms, Betty Muffler and Wawiriya Burton among the artists, and the subjects return to healing and to travel. Mother-of-pearl is set into the bathroom tile above heated floors.

Stonehill Taylor knitted the 1902 building to its 1905 neighbor at 80 Wall Street, whose floor levels did not line up, and put three more stories on the roof. Bar Tontine and the Gerdau Ballroom sit up there, under fifteen-foot ceilings and opening onto a terrace that wraps the floor.

The house bicycles and scooters go out at no charge. The building fills the Wall Street blockfront between Water and Pearl, once the city's pearl trading district. A tidy place for this family to land.