Gramercy Park Hotel

Hotel description

Gramercy Park Hotel is the latest luxury boutique hotel in New York from Ian Schrager. It is located on the private Gramercy Park, steps from Union Square and slightly below the Midtown area. The hotel features 2 bars (Rose Bar & Jade Bar) and a private rooftop lounge, the Roof Club. Currently there is no restaurant but award-winning restaurateur Danny Meyer is scheduled to open one there in Fall 09.

The fact that it’s Ian Schrager’s first hotel venture since his departure from the Morgans Hotel Group means that the Gramercy Park Hotel qualifies as big news, and upon the occasion of its opening much ink was spilled beneath any number of headlines, all of which said something roughly like The Boutique Hotel Is Dead, Long Live Ian Schrager. For the real news, you see, is that he has apparently repudiated the very concept of the hip hotel, a concept which if you’ve been following along was born of the 1980s collaboration between Schrager himself and Philippe Starck, and which has since been done absolutely to death by just about everyone else.

Unfortunately for the headline writers of the world (but fortunately for the hotel’s guests, as you’ll see) the Gramercy Park Hotel, for all the drama of its break with the previous arc of Schrager’s career, is in fact quite hip. It’s just that these days hip means something very different from what it used to. Nowadays interiors as cold and white as upholstered ice are commonplace, and a hotel just isn’t a proper boutique unless its lobby is overflowing with forced architectural whimsy and its bar is overflowing with the sort of people who exist only to be photographed at parties.

That sort of thing used to be cool, as ludicrous as it sounds. But what Schrager must be banking on is that the new cool looks something like this: not the desiccated atmosphere of a furniture showroom but rather an eclectic, bohemian approach, like someplace a very successful artist might live — someone like, say, Julian Schnabel, who by an extraordinary coincidence happens to have designed the interiors at the Gramercy Park Hotel, along with the famous British architect John Pawson. And instead of a velvet rope lined with vapid party people, you’ll have some genuine exclusivity about the place: it was here, in the hotel’s Rose Bar, that Schrager famously threw out the execrable Paris Hilton (never mind that she was a hotel guest at the time), putting her “and her ilk” on notice, starting a wave of blacklisting that, as far as we’re concerned, can’t possibly go too far.

If this is indeed the new face of the boutique hotel, then the coming years, as competitors scramble to imitate the place, will be happy ones: we’re all for bigger, more livable rooms, bathrooms spacious enough to function properly, professional service, an art collection straight out of MoMA, and a tinge of nostalgia for the refined glamour of prewar (or at least pre-disco) Manhattan. The hotel also offers a members-only Roof Club and Garden, as well as the Rose and Jade bars, the spa and fitness center, and upcoming restaurant by NYC food icon Danny Meyer (the previous Wakiya is closed) and, of course, the park: guests are issued keys to Gramercy Park itself, the only private park in Manhattan, another place where presumably Ms. Hilton and her ilk are not welcome.

Travelling with Kids

Guests over the age of 14 are considered adults. Some rooms accommodate 3 or more. The "deluxe double double" room sleeps up to 4 guests. For crib/cot, must book "loft" room or larger. For 2 adults + rollaway bed, must book "loft" or larger. For 2 adults + 2 kids beyond crib age, must book "deluxe double double" room or larger. Connecting rooms available. Must be confirmed upon check-in.

Cribs are available and may be subject to an additional fee. Roll-away beds available for an additional fee of US$75. No additional charges for kids beyond crib/roll-away.

There are no babysitting or daycare services available. The restaurant is kid-friendly. Room service offers a kids menu. Children's videos available