TWA Hotel leads for design: Eero Saarinen's 1962 TWA Flight Center at JFK, landmarked inside and out, with a Sunken Lounge under a split-flap board. Then come The Beekman, A Thompson Hotel, built round a nine-storey atrium of 1883 cast-iron galleries, and The Fifth Avenue Hotel, McKim, Mead & White's 1907 bank dressed by Martin Brudnizki.
10 of our ten · Hand-pickedHotels cannot pay to be hereLast checked: October 2026
Among our ten, design is mostly about the building, and often about what a hotel did with one made for something else: an airline terminal of 1962, an office block of 1883, banks of 1907 and 1912, and the 1884 apartment house where some artists paid their rent in paintings. The Plaza of 1907 and The Carlyle, A Rosewood Hotel of 1930 are the grand old names, and three were built new: The William Vale, 1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge and citizenM New York Bowery, opened between 2016 and 2018.
The city protects much of it. TWA Hotel's terminal has been a landmark inside and out since 1994, The Plaza's Palm Court and lobbies since 2005, and the atrium of The Beekman, A Thompson Hotel since 2024. In most of the ten the strongest design is downstairs, in a bar or dining room open to the city, so choose the public room you want to come home to, then book the room where the design reaches upstairs.
Eero Saarinen's terminal for TWA opened at what is now JFK in May 1962, the year after his death, and the city landmarked both its exterior and its interior in 1994. Restoration from 2016 recreated its penny tile and its odd-shaped windows, and the hotel opened in 2019 with 512 rooms in two new wings set behind the concrete shell.
The whole place is in period. Red-carpeted flight tubes lead from Terminal 5 to the check-in desk, the Sunken Lounge is a red conversation pit under a working Solari split-flap board, and parked outside is Connie, a 1958 Lockheed Constellation turned cocktail bar, with Mario Zamparelli's cabin murals restored. The rooms keep the theme going with Saarinen-designed Knoll furniture, terrazzo bathrooms with Hollywood vanities and rotary phones. It is at the airport, so treat it as a first or last night rather than a base.
The room to book
Deluxe King With Historic TWA View
$241 a night
The same Knoll-furnished room as the plain Deluxe King, turned to face Saarinen's concrete shell, for little or nothing more.
Silliman & Farnsworth designed the Temple Court Building, finished in 1883, and its core is an open well nine storeys high, with eight tiers of galleries climbing to a pyramid skylight still held in its original iron frame. Walls put up in the 1950s hid it for half a century, which is why the ironwork survived, and on 4 June 2024 the city made it an interior landmark. From the floor of The Bar Room, look up for Queen Anne balustrades, brackets cast as dragons and encaustic tile on the seven original tiers, and for the double hatches once used to hoist safes.
Upstairs, Martin Brudnizki's studio dressed the rooms in aged oak and jewel-toned velvet, with cognac leather headboards, vintage pieces and bathrooms of Carrara marble. Off the atrium, Tom Colicchio's Temple Court dines behind stained glass.
The room to book
Premium King
375 sq ft (35 m²)$659 a night
The first rung where the room itself changes: high ceilings and crown mouldings over 375 sq ft (35 m²), with velvet, leather, an armoire and a marble desk.
McKim, Mead & White designed this limestone, brick and terra-cotta bank on the corner of Fifth Avenue and West 28th Street in 1907, for the Second National Bank, and after ten years of work it opened as a hotel in autumn 2023. Martin Brudnizki dressed its public rooms as a Gilded Age house a century into its collecting: peacock sconces, black lacquered cabinets of curiosities in the lobby, Murano chandeliers and mirrored ceilings.
The banking hall, double height, now holds Café Carmellini, with two sculptural trees, sapphire velvet booths and balcony tables looking down on the room. The Portrait Bar is panelled and hung with paintings round a carved stone fireplace, and guests have it as a lounge from 8am to 5pm. The standard rooms are in a new tower behind the bank, dressed by the same hand, and the MICHELIN Guide has given the hotel Two Keys.
The room to book
The Corner King
375 sq ft (35 m²)$1,045 a night
The Grand King's 375 sq ft (35 m²) on a corner of the tower, with windows along two walls for the light; the bank's public rooms downstairs belong to every guest.
Rouse & Goldstone designed the S. Jarmulowsky Bank Building for the corner of Canal and Orchard, finished in 1912 with a domed tempietto over its rounded corner. The tempietto came down in the early 1990s; a replica with its eagles went up in 2017 and was finished in early 2020, and the hotel opened in June 2022.
The banking hall is now the Swan Room: tall arched windows, an ornamental ceiling rehabilitated from the 1912 drawings, and pink Tennessee and Botticino marble. Upstairs, the 113 rooms keep restored mouldings and tall windows, with BDDW headboards and lamps, and every one has an Ojas speaker tuned to four New York stations put together by Devon Turnbull and DJ Stretch Armstrong. There is a guests' lounge with a fireplace on the second floor as well.
The room to book
Corner King
355 sq ft (33 m²)$1,025 a night
Built into the bank's rounded corner, round a curve of three windows over Canal and Orchard: the room where the 1912 building shapes the stay.
Philip Hubert's red-brick building on West 23rd Street opened in 1884, with flower-ornamented iron balconies under a high mansard roof, and it has been a city landmark since 1966. The 2022 restoration kept its patina. Work by residents past and present hangs in the lobby and up the iron-railed staircase, much of it once traded for rent, and the front desk stands in the old ladies' tea room, beneath a frescoed ceiling of cherubs and roses.
El Quijote, first opened in 1930, still has its Don Quixote murals and red neon script, and down in the basement Teruko's sushi bar stands before a backbar rescued from the Orchid Bar of the Hotel Okura in Tokyo. In the rooms, headboards are painted like splattered canvases, curtains are pierced with small holes for a dappled light, and the marble bathrooms have antiqued brass.
The room to book
Chelsea Loft
600 to 700 sq ft (56 to 65 m²)$880 a night
One of the three original artists' studios on the 10th floor, with high ceilings, a living area, a soaking tub and the Manhattan skyline in the window.
Concrete, the Amsterdam studio that has long designed the brand's interiors, did this one too, and its 300 rooms were built as factory modules to a plan that is all economy: an XL king across the width under a wall-to-wall window, a rain shower in a glass pod and an iPad for the lights, mood colours, blinds and temperature. It is design as efficiency, at the lowest rate of our ten.
The art is the other half. Jonathan "Meres One" Cohen, founder of the 5 Pointz graffiti centre in Queens, led artists from its circle in painting the stairwell floor by floor as the Museum of Street Art. The New Museum, three minutes up the street, was asked to supply the art in the bedrooms, and the art-hung living room by the spiral stair has a life-size gorilla in it. At the top, cloudM looks from the Financial District to Midtown.
The room to book
Guest room, 1 King, Premium view
150 sq ft (14 m²)$195 a night
Every room is the same 150 sq ft (14 m²), so the window is the one thing that changes, and this is the only category sold on a panorama over Manhattan.
The design here is about materials. Over half the building is regional or reclaimed material, including heart pine from the Domino Sugar Factory and walnut from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden; a planted wall 25 feet high stands in the lobby, and the building is rated LEED Gold. The rooms have floor-to-ceiling glass, much of it sliding open, a filtered water tap and rain showers finished in Natal mahogany and marble.
The setting does the rest. The hotel stands at the Pier 1 entrance to Brooklyn Bridge Park, whose steps reuse granite from the Roosevelt Island Bridge, and the glass walls of Barbuto Brooklyn slide open onto the park. At the top of the ladder, the Riverhouse has mushroom-mycelium lampshades and a carved stone soaking tub.
The room to book
Bridge King
300 sq ft (27 m²)$580 a night
The window is the design: its sliding glass frames the Brooklyn tower and cables of the bridge about 200 metres away, in a room the same size as the Dumbo King.
Albo Liberis designed the tower, opened in 2016, for a stretch of Williamsburg where most buildings are four to six storeys high. It is lifted on a sculptural truss, four legs and a centre truss, with the hotel rooms on the 11th to 21st floors above offices, and the hotel has Vale Park, 15,000 sq ft (about 1,400 m²) of raised lawns and gardens.
The rooms repeat one idea 183 times: floor-to-ceiling glass and a private furnished balcony, about 70 sq ft (7 m²) even in the entry room. The tower is a long slab, so its long sides look over Greenpoint and Williamsburg, and Manhattan belongs to the narrow west end and the corners beside it. Above the rooms, Westlight on the 22nd floor takes in Manhattan, the East River and Williamsburg.
The room to book
Manhattan View Queen with Balcony
240 sq ft (22 m²) plus a 72 sq ft (7 m²) balcony$331 a night
The first category whose balcony faces the Midtown skyline rather than the neighbourhood, from the towers round Madison Square and Hudson Yards to the Empire State Building.
Henry Hardenbergh designed The Plaza as a French Renaissance château in marble and white brick under a mansard roof, and it opened on 1 October 1907. The exterior has been a city landmark since 1969, and in 2005 protection reached inside, to the Palm Court, the lobbies, the ballroom and the Oak Room.
The Palm Court is the room to see. Its stained-glass laylight came down in 1944 and was recreated in the restoration, and the palms, trellis and oval bar beneath it are Thierry Despont's 2014 redesign. Every guest room has a mosaic bathroom with 24-carat gold-plated Sherle Wagner fixtures, and two rooms are set pieces of their own: the Eloise Suite, pink and white right through to the bathroom, and the Tower Room, a round bedroom in a corner turret under a 23-foot brick ceiling.
The room to book
Terrace Room King
550 sq ft (51 m²) plus a 100 sq ft (9 m²) terrace$1,455 a night
The Deluxe King's 550 sq ft (51 m²), with the same mosaic bathroom and gold-plated fixtures, plus a private terrace over the landscaped courtyard: the only outdoor space below the suites.
Book afternoon tea in the Palm Court ahead, to sit under the laylight; for the holiday tea, mid-November to mid-January, hotel guests can reserve 90 days out.
The Carlyle, A Rosewood Hotel opened in 1930 as an Art Deco tower on Madison Avenue at 76th Street, with interiors by Dorothy Draper, and its design is at its richest on the ground floor. Ludwig Bemelmans covered the walls of the bar that opened in 1947 with Central Park through the four seasons, Madeline and her classmates among the scenes. Next door, Café Carlyle, a cabaret room since 1955, is painted with Marcel Vertès's murals, and tea is served in The Gallery, which Renzo Mongiardino designed in red velvet with Topkapi Palace in mind.
Upstairs, tonychi studio redesigned most of the 192 rooms and suites in a renovation finished in 2021, with black lacquered panelling and Central Park wallpaper that answers Bemelmans downstairs. High in the tower, Thierry Despont designed the Empire Suite, a duplex looking over the park.
The room to book
Premier Room
450 sq ft (42 m²)$1,650 a night
The first room with both the Madison Avenue outlook and a soaking tub, at 450 sq ft (42 m²), a quarter bigger than the entry room.
Of our ten, three: TWA Hotel, The Plaza and The Beekman, A Thompson Hotel. The city made the exterior and interior of Eero Saarinen's TWA Flight Center a landmark in 1994. The Plaza's exterior has been a landmark since 1969, and in 2005 the city protected its Palm Court, lobbies, ballroom and Oak Room too. The Beekman, A Thompson Hotel's nine-storey atrium of cast-iron galleries became an interior landmark on 4 June 2024. Two more stand in landmark buildings: Hotel Chelsea, a city landmark since 1966, and Nine Orchard, the 1912 Jarmulowsky Bank, landmarked in 2009.
Which New York hotels are in old bank buildings?
Two of our ten, and both make the banking hall their main room. The Fifth Avenue Hotel fills the bank McKim, Mead & White designed in 1907 for the Second National Bank, on Fifth Avenue at West 28th Street, with Café Carmellini in the double-height hall; the old building holds only suites. Nine Orchard is the 1912 S. Jarmulowsky Bank on the corner of Canal and Orchard, where the banking hall is the Swan Room, a cocktail bar under an ornamental ceiling rehabilitated from the 1912 drawings, and the corner dome has been rebuilt.
Is there an affordable design hotel in New York?
Three of our ten start below $300 a night in January. citizenM New York Bowery, at about $180, has rooms built as factory modules, with interiors by the Amsterdam studio Concrete, and a stairwell painted floor by floor by street artists. TWA Hotel, at about $225, puts Saarinen-designed Knoll furniture and terrazzo bathrooms in every room beside his 1962 terminal. The William Vale, at about $260, gives every room floor-to-ceiling glass and a private balcony. These are January starting prices before tax, and TWA Hotel and The William Vale add a nightly fee.
Is the art still on the walls at Hotel Chelsea?
Yes. The 2022 restoration rehung work by residents past and present in the lobby, much of it once traded for rent, and more lines the iron-railed staircase that winds from the lobby to the roof. The front desk stands in the old ladies' tea room, under its frescoed ceiling of cherubs and roses. El Quijote, first opened in 1930, kept its Don Quixote murals, its red booths and the bar where Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe were regulars, and the Lobby Bar, in the original dining rooms, has more art from former residents.
Which rooms at TWA Hotel look at the Saarinen terminal?
Those with Historic TWA View in the name. The Deluxe King With Historic TWA View is the one to book: the same room as the plain Deluxe King, turned to face the terminal's concrete shell, for little or nothing more. The Deluxe Double Queen With Historic TWA View does the same with two queens, the Executive King Suite With Historic TWA View adds a sitting area, and the Eero Saarinen Presidential Suite With Historic TWA View looks over the terminal from a larger one. An accessible Deluxe King has the view too. Standard and plain Deluxe rooms promise no view, and the Runway View rooms face the airfield.
How did you choose these hotels?
Independently, through extensive research, trusted sources and first-hand visits. Hotels cannot pay to be included, and every one of the ten has to exist for a different reason.
The special one
