Staying in Style
Amidst the hustle and bustle of Manhattan’s NoMad district stands Ace Hotel New York, at once a hive of boutique drinking and dining and a paragon of peerless style
words by Will HALBERT
There’s something to be said for a hotel that goes the extra mile to make your stay the main event of your holiday. 506 words worth of something, as it happens. So here goes:
As much in service as in looks, Ace Hotel is nothing if not a masterclass in going the extra mile. Many of the rooms not only boast the kind of beds you could quite literally get lost in, some even come adorned with additional flourishes like acoustic guitars (in my case, much appreciated but criminally underplayed) and record players (because if you’re not kicking your Manhattan mornings off with the endearingly lo-fi, white knuckle energy of a Clash LP then you owe yourself an apology). They’re small touches, to be sure. But they’re indicative of Ace’s desire to deliver more than just a place to sleep.
Flourishes aside, the rooms themselves are edgy, spacious and utilitarian by design. They’re the kind of rooms that Dashiel Hammett might well have designed. You know, if interior design had tickled his fancy as opposed to weaving tales of the hard boiled, the gun toting and the downright rotten. There’s a slick-but-minimal, mid-century cool to each room’s aesthetic. Clothes racks are fashioned from repurposed plumbing pipes, hanging steel boxes replace the more traditional closet as a storage option, and Smeg fridges lend their vintage appeal to many of the rooms. Ace’s penchant for material re-appropriation isn’t just a conscious callback to the NoMad district’s fashion and garment history, it’s a mission statement, a visual manifesto. Ace Hotel doesn’t shout, it whispers.
The same cannot be said for the lobby, which is joyously (and perpetually) alive with the conversations of Ace’s myriad guests as they eb and flow to the helter skelter cadence of keyboard tapping, glass clinking and general, hipsterly hedonism. The lobby, in all of its vaguely baroque splendour, is part meeting place, part communal working hub, and part operatic stage. And I mean this quite literally. On select nights, the lobby sets the stage for The People’s Opera; A group of New York based Opera Singers seeking to make opera accessible to the general public. They tread through the lobby crowds flexing some serious vocal virtuosity, eliciting a taverna-like camaraderie amongst the hotel’s evening guests.Topping things off is the adjoining Breslin, a low-key, low-light and seemingly never not busy restaurant and bar. It’s an oh-so cool and ever-so-slightly British bistro with some killer dishes on the menu, including a pie that would give The Ace’s aforementioned hotel beds a Napoleon complex. In truth, it’s hard to truly sum up the feel and magnitude of Manhattan’s Ace Hotel, but the word ‘improvisational’ springs to mind. Not in the sense of haphazardly making things up. This is no series of lucky breaks that Ace Hotel has on its hands. Ace’s design ethos is as playful as it is measured and masterful, it’s the aesthetic and architectural equivalent of Bebop Jazz: A fluid and frantic whirring of styles and attitudes that charm the senses without ever fully overwhelming them. As a result, it’s hard to downplay the hotel’s appeal. When the hotel stay becomes a holiday in its own right, it’s a fairly solid indication you’re doing something seriously right.
acehotel.com
