“Loopy Doopy” lobby.

Walking into the new Conrad New York hotel gave us weird déjà vu.

Greeting us at the top of a wide marble staircase was Sol LeWitt’s towering Loopy Doopy, a feast of purple swirls plotted on a blue grid. But what was it doing on that wall?

We’d seen the space before, of course. The Conrad occupies the 16-story brick structure built in 2000 to house an outskirts-of-the-Financial District outpost of Embassy Suites. We spent a night and wrote about it shortly after it opened. Then as now, Loopy Doopy, 100 feet tall and 80 feet wide, was entrancing and imposing (it gobbled up 100 gallons of paint). But the lobby looked so altered, with  futuristic furniture lighted from beneath and bursts of orange punctuating the cool gray and white surroundings, the mural’s location seemed different, too. (more…)