Stay into Night.

Having two hotels two blocks apart from each other with same name sounds confusing. But that’s exactly what Vikram Chatwal and the folks at Wyndham Hotels did late last month. They turned Stay, a 2008 Times Square boutique with teeny rooms and a sprawling, love-to-party lobby, into Night Times Square. The original Night Hotel, also in Times Square, stands unchanged – a study in dark-as-night black and white — two blocks downtown on West 45 Street.  (more…)

At home with Christopher Columbus.

No, you can’t buy the Nina, Pinta or Santa Maria. But how about a price-slashed Mitchell Gold white leather side chair? Or a deeply discounted 48-inch Samsung LED TV?

Last fall I wrote about Christopher Columbus’s living room – the one artist Tatzu Nishi designed up in the air around the famed Christopher Columbus statue (you could visit the living room, see Gaetano Russo’s towering  marble statue up close and personal, then cross the street and gaze down upon Columbus’s temporary abode from the lounge on the 35^th floor of the Mandarin Oriental New York).

This morning the Public Art Fund launched an online tag sale of the contents of the great explorer’s living room. Demand for the sofas, side tables and even candlesticks was so fierce the site crashed briefly. (more…)

Trilby -- on the outside looking in.

The Cooper Square, the chilly-chic East Village hotel that looks like it belongs in Dubai, is less than three years old, but already its restaurant is in the try, try again stage.

First came LA celebrity chef Govind Armstrong’s Table 8. Trendy and self-conscious, it lasted less than a year. Next up, Faustina. But even chef Scott Conant’s stylish Italian cooking couldn’t warm up that hard-edged dining room, so not the East Village. (more…)

The new sign.

Fashion is indeed fickle — even, apparently, when it comes to hotels. Consider the newly flagged Hilton New York/Fashion District. This fashion-themed high rise – so close to the Fashion Institute of Technology you can teeter over in mile-high Louboutins — opened officially April 5, 2010 as Fashion 26 — A Wyndham Hotel.

Wyndham, which has four other New York City properties including the newly flagged Dream and Night hotels, reveled in the hotel’s singular, theme-conscious look (mannequins in the window, side tables shaped like gigantic metal spools). “As we got into the development process, we realized we wanted something a little more unique,” Wyndham president Jeff Wagoner told an interviewer a while back. (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.

(more…)

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…)