Crosby Street - Hotel New York

It is September 2009, with just 48 hours to go until Crosby Street Hotel’s much anticipated launch. Sleeper finds an astonishingly composed Kit Kemp in the pink-and-pumice-hued Drawing Room, calmly assembling a lamp by Rolf Sachs. The complicated instructions for his ‘Aladdin’ piece are enough to have the most serene of individuals tearing their hair out. And she still has a restaurant, three sitting rooms, and scores of bedrooms to finesse before opening the doors to Firmdale’s first foray into what is arguably the most competitive hotel market in the world. Yet Kemp’s demeanour is symptomatic of the quiet confidence with which the company has approached their entry into New York.

Surrounded by Udaipur market finds and Art Basel Miami commissions, she explains that a patchwork-felt sofa was the end result of her and a friend sitting up late personally cutting and stitching the pieces for it. She gestures to rustic-meets-regal chairs covered in Argentine rugs and points out that the deliberately rouched fabric is the product of her personally meeting the upholsterers and explaining she didn’t want them looking perfect, but with characterful puckers. Such is Kemp’s commitment to detail.

The opening of the Crosby Street Hotel has added a Manhattan outpost to what was previously an all-London portfolio, including The Covent Garden Hotel, The Haymarket, and The Soho Hotel. Kemp’s designs have provided a welcome injection of colour and flamboyance into New York’s largely monochrome hotel landscape. It is her unique design flair, combined with the group’s near-legendary service standards, that the Kemps are hoping will prove as attractive to their loyal customer base in New York as it has in London. “There is a gap, this tiny little gap that we don’t see any other hotel filling,” says Kit, one half of the hands-on husband-and-wife hotelier team. “We really don’t see another hotel where all the rooms have been individually designed and with the attention to detail that we have. Also we use a lot of colour and I find, too, that everyone is trying to copy one another and it’s all starting to look rather formulaic, whereas our formula, if we have one, is to make every building look individual.”

Architectural firm Stonehill & Taylor is behind this impressive newbuild that replaces a once-empty parking lot on a quiet SoHo sidestreet between Spring and Prince. After only two years of construction stands a distinguished 11-storey building. The red-brick façade is set back from the road allowing for an extra-wide sidewalk to be sprinkled with Kit Kemp’s fairy dust, care of a pebble-adorned pavement and tall, leafy trees.

So as to ensure natural light flooded all of its 86 guestrooms, 12 x 10 steel-and-glass Crittal windows were incorporated, lending not only loft-style hipness but also echoing characteristics of its sister property, the Soho Hotel in London. Peer through the green-tinted glass into the ground floor and you instantly get a taste of the visual feast that awaits. The lobby showcases a 10ft metal head artwork by artist Jaume Plensa, life-size cartoon-mâché dog sculptures from Justine Smith, and more canine eye candy in Peter Clark collages. And instead of a conventional sign denoting where you are, an artwork on the wall is comprised of large letters spelling out ‘Crosby’ in notes, while coins form ‘Street’.
The eclectic interior design has been created by Kit working with her five-strong, full-time design team. As ever with Firmdale, every corner contains witty, specially-commissioned art alongside touchy-feely textures and furnishings. “When you travel,” says Kemp, “you don’t want places to feel mass produced and vacuum packed. You want some adventure to be put into the experience.”

She has personally sourced and styled most of what you see. “It was a peripatetic two-and-a-half-year process,” she says. The forty different bedroom schemes are an orgy of contrasting headboards, drapes and wallcoverings from the likes of Manuel Canovas, Osborne & Little and Robert Allen. As is customary for Firmdale, each boudoir is lavished with cherry-picked antiques and artworks – including her signature dressmakers’ mannequin – and then, at the eleventh-hour, it’s all given a final edit by Kit.

All the boudoirs are spacious, and even the most compact are uncharacteristically spacious for Manhattan. All the mod-cons you’d expect are there too, but don’t think for a moment they’re so vulgar as to flaunt this. Elegantly incorporated is a Blu-Ray CD/DVD player, a Bose iPod dock and a giant flatscreen. More than a mere head-resting rendezvous in a city that never sleeps, bon vivants can also expect sophisticated on-site socialising.

Perhaps wary of the notoriously fickle New York dining scene, Firmdale bill the hotel’s main food and beverage space as “a bar that serves great food” rather than a ‘restaurant’ per se. This grey-oak-floored ground-level space is dominated by a sweeping pewter countertop, another Kemp hallmark. Colour comes courtesy of a more-is-more approach: felt chairs are appliquéd with mythical creatures, multiple candy-coloured vintage lights hang at different levels and padded purple-wool walls are adorned with tongue-in-cheek original artworks from a fake-flower-festooned Four Seasons of Queen Elizabeth II to a bovine collage – both cheeky nods to the hotel’s British heritage.
The conviviality spills onto a small patio and a residents-only courtyard, decked out in more of an inspired mishmash of exotic and traditional furniture, a tall tree sculpture, and Moroccan lanterns. Both are overlooked by an organic wildflower-enhanced roof garden, which adjoins the jewel-in-the-crown Meadow Suite. Not just a pretty space, this patch of green is one of the feathers in the hotel’s environmental cap. Crosby Street Hotel’s sustainability credentials have earned it a gold-level LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) accreditation.

Another feature that has the Crosby Street Hotel standing out from the crowd – no easy achievement in Manhattan (and guaranteeing it place on the celebrity circuit) – is the orange-leather-seated screening room. Within weeks of opening, Daniel Day-Lewis, Penelope Cruz and Harvey Weinstein were among the luminaries to grace the Poltrona Frau-resplendent cinema. The sprawling subterranean event space also includes an anything-but-corporate meeting room as suited to an intimate wedding as a creative brainstorm, as well as two more charming-yet-quirky sitting rooms.

Of course the economic climate is not ideal to be launching a new luxury property into the rate-driven New York hotel market, but Firmdale are sticking to their guns. 
“We believe that a quality product and a smart strategy will see us through,” comments Craig Markham, the group’s Marketing & PR director for two decades of its 22-year history. “This means not resorting to heavy discounting but instead adding value. It’s important to stay strong and not be tempted to cut process to compete. This is particularly the case in New York where it’s all about rate. Many hotels simply slash their rates to compete. At the Crosby Street Hotel our rate may appear to be high but we have a top-end quality product and there are no small rooms to sell off at a low price.”

In fact so confident are they of Crosby Street’s success that Firmdale has another NYC hotel planned, the Kemps having earmarked a patch off  W56th Street for their next project. Meanwhile, back on their home turf, they have acquired the much sought-after Ham Yard site in London’s Soho, for their biggest project to date.

Crosby Street Hotel
79 Crosby Street
New York NY 10012
 Tel: +1 212 226 6400
Web: www.firmdale.com

Rooms 86 bedrooms
Drinking The Crosby Bar, The Drawing Room
Leisure Gym
Facilities 3 private event rooms, 99 seat Screening Room