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Chic Suites
Planning a trip to New York? Check in to the new breed of hip, boutique - style hotels geared to the design - sensitive
Three years ago I booked a stay at New York City's Mansfield Hotel. I had heard great things: that the hotel was under renovation, that it was gorgeous, intimate. Stepping around the drop sheets and through the plaster dust in the lobby and making my way to number 501 wasn't pretty, the room, less so: a soiled carpet, fading ripped wallpaper, handles sadly falling off a tired chest of drawers. I kept my shoes on and booked out.
My latest trip to the hotel's West 44th Street address, to unearth the newest in Manhattan's high - style boutique hotels, left an entirely different impression. As the fourth feather in Bernard Goldberg's hotelier cap -- to date he has painstakingly restored the city's Hotel Wales, The Franklin and The Shoreham, all previously dilapidated hotels built between 1901 and 1931 -- the Mansfield is a chic new midtown destination for both business travellers and tourists and proof - positive of the adage, "good things come in small packages."
Ian Schrager jump - started the hip, happening hotel trend when he teamed with Andree Putman to orchestrate a sophisticated redux of Morgans in 1984, then again in 1988 and 1990, with Philippe Starck, who designed his sexy Royalton and Paramount hotels. The three number among a growing crop of New York City lodgings emerging for the design - sensitive.
Goldberg is big on substance. His people spent a month and a half just stripping the accumulated layers of paint off the handrail and cleaning up the original iron balustrades of the Mansfield's winding mahogany - backed staircase. The Gotham Hospitality Group, Goldberg's company, also painstakingly restored the terrazzo hallway floors' original colour scheme and then worked backward, fine - tuning the hotel's interior...