If the very au courant trend for rough luxe is to your taste, then a weekend at the Ace Hotel New York may have you redesigning your whole house. Originally built in 1904, local designers Roman and Williams have transformed the building – with hefty pillars and monochrome mosaic floors – into a kind of steampunk hunting lodge.
The formula is identical to the no-frills, budget-hotel-reinvented original Aces on the West Coast, and while the appealingly apartment-like rooms are spartan (with full-size SMEG fridges, and chic white tiled bathrooms with rainforest-head showers), the lobby feels like the bustling, manic epicentre of Manhattan cool, complete with a few oddball ‘holdover’ tenants milling around from its pre-Ace days.
The Ace has a gloriously rough-around-the-edges Gotham feel, from the pitch-black Breslin restaurant to the rickety lifts. A refreshing practicality and sense of humour abounds: the ‘Do not disturb’ signs are magnets, which cling to the metal doors and read ‘NOT NOW’. The rooms have a deliberately utilitarian feel; clocking in somewhere between a military dorm and a flophouse reimagined by Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garcons. The only disappointment is that few of the guests are cool enough to live up to the promise of the design.
What’s hot?
- The lobby is a total scene – right down to the b&w photobooth – but seldom tips over into bridge-and-tunnel territory.
- The branch of Stumptown Coffee, staffed by tattooed boys with braces and beards, churns out the best latte in Manhattan.
- Fantastic, cleverly curated background music: from contemporary Oregonian rock to long-forgotten 80s Bowie album tracks.
- Some of the best shopping in the city is on-site, with a branch of Opening Ceremony and an offshoot of Project No.8.
What’s not?
- Check-in and check-out can be haphazard, especially at busy times.
- The rock 'n' roll vibe can spill over, noisily, into the corridors in the early hours.
Need to Know: Ace Hotel New York
Number of rooms: 258
Check-in/check-out times: 3pm and 12noon
Swimming pool: No
Spa: No
Dogs welcome: Yes
Eating and drinking: It makes sense that the hippest hotel in the city would have the hippest restaurateur and chef duo in town: Ken Friedman and April Bloomfield. The Breslin opened at the end of 2009, with a parallel meat-heavy, no-booking-possible, British gastropub-style version of their Greenwich Village hit, the Spotted Pig. They opened a new version of their John Dory restaurant, this time as an oyster bar, in November 2010 across the lobby. Elsewhere, the lobby bar is small and fairly frantic during the after-work rush hours, and Stumptown Coffee justifiably draws perennially long queues.
Near to? Midtown – a few blocks between the Flatiron building and the Empire State; the Ace is in an uninspiring neighbourhood of florists and wholesalers, but its arrival is rejuvenating the district. Eataly, the vast, 50,000 square foot all-Italian food lover’s mega-deli, is a six-minute stroll away.
Getting there: While New York has a few major airports (John F Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark Liberty International Airport out in Newark, New Jersey), visitors from the UK will more than likely be landing at JFK. Getting from the airport to Ace Hotel New York is a straight choice between shuttle bus, subway and taxi. Buses run every 20 minutes or so from 6am to midnight, and can take up to an hour or so to get to Grand Central Station. The 28th Street subway stop – for lines N and R – is a block away from the hotel. A taxi from JFK can take anything from 30 minutes to 1 hour 20 minutes (depending on the traffic) but a flat fare was recently introduced.
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