Neighborhood:(*13*) Upper East Side
Why we picked it:(*13*) For the comfy, wood-burning fireplaces in nearly each room.
In an period when what’s latest and quickest usually will get the highlight, The Lowell, quietly holding courtroom on a leafy block on New York City’s Upper East Side for the reason that Nineteen Twenties, stays a bastion of sophistication and class. Sometimes you could want to attend a couple of minutes for one of many two elevators that service the resort’s 74 rooms and suites, all reimagined by Michael S. Smith, the designer behind the White House updates throughout Obama’s presidency. But that’s okay; when you wait, you’ll be able to fairly actually cease and odor the flowers—beautiful recent bouquets are positioned all through the resort. There are actual room keys and precise gentle switches to flick, analog vestiges from less complicated days that paradoxically make issues simpler than the newest improvements. There are dozens of beautiful, throwback touches, such because the Club Room, a complicated convivial house off the foyer and adjoining to the resort’s French restaurant, Majorelle, with oak parquet flooring, a fire, and a small bar, for the unique use of resort visitors and their companions till 5 p.m., when the general public can be part of. And whereas this neighborhood may by no means be probably the most avant-garde sweep of Manhattan, it isn’t completely caught in amber. Previously downtown manufacturers (Foundrae, Khaite, Ulla Johnson, Toteme) have opened outposts on close by Madison Avenue, and the Frick Collection, a couple of blocks to the north, just lately revealed a large renovation. It looks as if the storied Upper East could be getting into one other Gilded Age. —Rebecca Misner