Kristen McGinnis’s lacquered dining room.

The best hotel rooms are the ones filled with things you want to steal – like decorating ideas.

A great decorator show house is even better. The designers, of course, want you to hire them, but they have to put their ideas out there to lure you in. And this year’s Kips Bay Decorator Show House, the biggie of the bunch in New York City, is jam-packed with ideas ripe for the plucking.

After last year’s foray to a chilly high-rise condominium overlooking the Hudson on Riverside Boulevard, this year’s show house returns to more familiar ground, namely a svelte, late 19th-century townhouse on the East Side.  We found ten ideas to tweak, transplant – or just dream about – in almost any kind of abode.

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When hotel historians – hey, they’re out there somewhere — look back on 2012, they’ll say what we already know: it was, for the most part, a very good year.

Bookish: the NoMad library.

New York City boasts 91,500 hotel rooms – up from 90,000 in 2011. Put another way, 29 million hotel room nights were sold in New York City in 2012.

Manhattan’s newest hotels were among its cleverest (cheers to the NoMad, Conrad New York, Pod 39 and TRYP New York Times Square South). And hotels you’d actually want to visit are popping up in the outer boroughs – even Staten Island – with Brooklyn (and the hipster Wythe) leading the charge.

No one will say 2012 was always easy. Killer hurricanes that flood lobbies, kill the lights and uproot guests when nearby building cranes become unhinged don’t blow in every year (we hope).  But as we slip into 2013, for most hotels – and current guests — Sandy is mere memory.

Here is our second annual list of what struck us as the best of the new. (more…)

By the time 2011 morphed into a memory at the stroke of midnight, New York City boasted an unprecedented 90,000 hotel rooms. But the year that was didn’t just set records. If 2011 was a wine we’d raise a glass (and buy several cases). (more…)