No smoking — ever.

Once upon a time, no hotel room was complete without an ashtray. Non-smoking rooms eventually appeared and, voila, room categories were born.

Now the choices for guests booking at a small but growing number of hotels include a third category   – the hypo-allergenic room, cleansed within an inch of its life of nearly all surface and air-born impurities. For the estimated one in five people afflicted with allergies or asthma, this is news worth noting.

This month Hyatt became the first hotel chain to mount a grand-scale effort to purify its rooms – at least some of them. More than 60 full-service Hyatts currently offer the brand’s new Respire Hypo-Allergenic rooms, including the Andaz Fifth Avenue, Andaz Wall Street and Grand Hyatt, whose entire 29^th floor is pure Respire, in New York. (more…)

The stylish basement theater.

Almost as many New York City hotels have screening rooms as spas. But it’s a lot easier to visit a hotel spa than to settle in with a bag of popcorn for a movie in a hotel screening room.

Though chic abodes like the Bryant Park Hotel and the Tribeca Grand have suitably eye-catching movie theaters, as rental spaces they’re the domain of invited guests.

Which is why the Crosby Street Hotel’s 100-seat movie theater is so cool. Every week, the Crosby Sunday Night Film Club screens a movie and a short feature at 8 pm.

Admission to the “club” requires neither dues nor hazing: you either book the three-course movie dinner ($50) or the movie bar plate for two ($25 a person).

Crosby’s cinematic offerings, from what we can tell, are smart indies caught in the brief post-theater, pre-DVD interlude, like I am Love. In other words, don’t expect much overlap with the mainstream multiplex (except on October 31, when Saw 3D bloodies the screen). (more…)

The Carlyle Hotel.

The uniformed attendants posted behind a discrete desk in the grand black-and-white lobby were impeccably polite.  But check-in wasn’t unspooling quite as we expected. The man next to me, owner of a blue blazer and a belligerent British accent, waved a sheet of paper and demanded to know what the devil these bloody charges were.

I, meanwhile, stood and waited – and waited – and waited. I’d supplied a credit card, cell phone number and e-mail address. I’d learned in detail about the hotel’s various services – yes, I’d be sure to have a drink in Bemelmans Bar, and the spa sounded divine. But I still didn’t have our room key. (more…)

The Breslin at the Ace.

I don’t own a car, and I definitely don’t spend much time thinking about tires.  But as long-time fans of London’s Bibendum restaurant and followers of the red-coated Michelin restaurant guides, the French tire maker and its well-padded mascot have insinuated themselves into our lives.

I loved John Colapinto’s 2009 New Yorker piece “Lunch with M,” which immortalized the author’s waistline defying meal with a proudly anonymous Michelin inspector at Jean Georges, the Trump International Hotel’s stylish restaurant.  Jean Georges landed three stars, the Michelin equivalent of an A + (exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey),  in the 2010 guide, the only restaurant in a hotel to do so last year. (more…)

Before: the old red rug.

Last year Time Square’s Paramount hotel underwent major surgery.  And not a moment too soon.  Once quirky and cool, the Paramount was conceived in the early 1990s by hotelier Ian Schrager and designer Philippe Starck as the hotel equivalent of Target, offering chic on the cheap. A decade later, cheap had trounced chic, and the place was a dirty, neglected mess.

As countless actors know – I won’t name names – not every facelift is a winner, and the Paramount’s results were decidedly mixed. On the plus side were the spiffed up rooms, less clever than before (how do you top headboards fashioned as gigantic, gold-framed renderings of Vermeer portraits?) but cleaner and more comfortable with central A/C and heating.

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The "new" Royalton bar/restaurant.

Hotels are notorious for tardiness when it comes to everything from opening their doors to refurbishing the lobby. But not the Royalton.

This summer Brasserie 44, the hotel’s buzzy-at-lunch lobby restaurant, closed for renovation. Its transformation was to debut in September. And voila – the space, its name slimmed down to Forty-Four, soft-opened for private parties and select customers this week and opens to the public on Monday, October 4, retooled as a gigantic cocktail lounge. In hotel years, that’s right on the dot. (more…)