High on hudson hotel

Design euphoria finally has a New York home. With the opening of the 1,000-room Hudson Hotel, the tandem of Ian Schrager andPhilippe Starck fires the latest and best salvo yet in an ongoing war against the status quo in the hotel industry. The Hudson, the duo’s first New York City hotel in more than a decade, delivers a potent combination of urban adventure, daredevil design, and true affordability to arguably the most jaded city in the world, giving New York something even it has never seen before.

In a city renowned for its boldness, diversity and eclecticism, The Hudson, on 58th Street between Eight and Ninth Avenues, pumps up New York’s legendary status as a noble social experiment. The result is a most radical, relevant, and purely delightful hotel to date. It also brings Schrager and Starck into focus as two of the outstanding social scientists of our time.

How much design can people tolerate? How many people are willing to pay for a room in which all but a few inches of floor space are covered by the mattress? How do you create a raving, Dionysian bar scene without repelling the Apollonian creative types you would also like to attract? These are a few questions that came to mind as we approached the hotel on a block just off Columbus Circle.

Once again, Schrager and Starck have captured the attention and fancy of a group of Filipino New Yorkers who were eager to explore this latest foray into this lodging-cum-social-scene genre. Our small group composed of Thea Robles, Kira Arciaga and Roger Gomez couldn’t wait for our full quota of surprises and amenities we’ve come to expect from this dream team.

We all agree that the Hudson Hotel has appeal on the human and emotional level. An inspired blend of old and new, a refuge from the ordinary. Its visual whirlwind and collision of styles provide a welcome antidote to post-modern sameness and self-satisfied minimalism.

You Are Where You Sleep

I have always loved hotels, and Philippe Starck never ceases to amaze me. I could live serenely in one of Hudson’s small $95-a-night bedrooms. Each is a perfect pillbox, your daily vitamin of space. Inspired by the romance of transatlantic travel, they are reminiscent of a private cabin on an upscale yacht.

You enter the room through a tiny hall: For a room this size, any hall feels extravagant. Shower and bath on the left, storage on the right. A mini-stereo set and a mini-bar. A mini-window above the headboard, and that’s it. Suites are available, starting at $150, but why bother. Sleep small. Dream big. That’s the Hudson idea. It’s an Eloise concept. The grown-up world as seen through the child’s eyes. The entrepreneur’s rationale: Get guests out of their rooms and into the hotel’s action, enlivened by attractive men and women about town.

At the Hudson, everything is a play on scale, from the stretch-version "Vertigo" escalators at the entrance to the bento box rooms upstairs. Just the thought of a 1,000-room Schrager hotel is a wild exaggeration. This boutique hotel is designed for Gulliver’s travels.

Post-literate people will feel most welcome at the Hudson. At the entrance, no name, no letters, no typography disturb the design. Instead, there is a torch with an eternal flame, suspended beside a doorway sheathed with chartreuse glass. In colonial days, hospitality was symbolized by carved wooden pineapples placed by the door. At the Hudson, citron twists are evidently the fruit of choice.

The foyer functions brilliantly as a decompression chamber that transitions guests from the hustle and bustle of New York to the separate reality within. This urban chill-out zone contains a tunnel in vivid chartreuse housing an escalator that transports you like a margarita being sipped from a straw.

Hotel As Theater

The main lobbies of all grand hotels are stage sets. Serving as Hudson’s heart, its "town square," and visible from practically anywhere in the hotel is the bucolic Private Park, with its 45-foot trees, brick walls smothered in ivy, whimsically over-scaled gardening tools, and a charming assortment of antique and modern garden furniture. Like a vibrant microcosm of Central Park, it is a year-round refuge for dining, drinking, relaxing, and enjoying unique concerts, events and performances.

The centerpiece of this square, in effect its statue or fountain, is a long wooden desk with a mock-Bavarian motif, and an enormous Baccarat chandelier with hologram candles designed by Ingo Maurer.

The lobby is ringed with the sort of refreshment spots you would expect to find in a well-appointed piazza. Only a surrealist sense of surprise unites the different styles in which the public rooms are designed.

The bar is Kubrick territory. The translucent floor, illuminated from beneath, sets off tables and chairs like game pieces on a board. Make your move toward a Regency side chair with silicone cushions. Or pull up a log, equipped with backrests, designed by the Dutch firm Droog. Overhead, a fresco by Francesco Clemente brings back memories of a similar work executed by the artist for the Palladium, an earlier Schrager experiment. To my eye, the ceiling creates a stronger impact than the installation conceived for the Guggenheim Museum’s Clemente retrospective last year.

The library contains all the classic elements one might expect: high ceilings, elegant wood panelling, walls crammed floor-to-ceiling with interesting books, a large working fireplace, a 75-year-old billiard table, antique rugs, and lots of comfortable furniture.

Unexpected are the thoroughly modern flat panel computer screens integrated into custom cyber-desks, an outrageously large Ingo Maurer dome lamp that spills purple light onto the billiard table, and a series of humorous black & white photographs of Jean Baptiste Mondino. And while this mix of traditional and highly unusual elements might seem to be at raucous odds, somehow they serenely co-exist in a collage that is surprisingly balanced, refined, cerebral and comforting.

Installed in the courtyard between the building’s two wings, the so-called Private Park has been conceived as a theatre: the play within the play. Readings and recitals will be offered, along with drinks and snacks, while the guest rooms looking onto the garden will form tier upon tier of private boxes.

Visible from the lobby, and indeed from practically everywhere in the entire hotel, is the incredible Private Park, a lavishly landscaped courtyard garden situated above the fray of the city, yet eternally and emotionally connected to it. Recalling the richness of classic New York roof gardens at the turn-of-the century, where chic city dwellers sought refuge from the hectic urban terrain, it’s like a patch of Central Park hovering above West 57th Street.

Hotel As Lifestyle

It strikes me that Starck may be feeling at home with himself. What is notable about the Hudson is that only a few pieces of furniture bear the designer’s trademark. Instead, he has curated environments that include furnishings by other well-known designers (Charles and Ray Eames, Ingo Maurer, Droog), along with generic examples of period styles. Executed with precision and spirit by Anda Andrei and Michael Overington, longtime players on Schrager’s team, the result is something more relaxed, more diverse, and less insistent in controlling the atmosphere.

New York may be the most judgmental city in the world, and the Hudson can’t help keeping that tradition, too. It helps to be a certain kind of narcissist, the type who never throws a fit to get attention because he always assumes he’s getting it, even when he’s being ignored. It also helps to be a creative type with more dash than cash, as Vogue used to call it.

Although Schrager loves to rhapsodize about the collective "unconsciousness" grounding the work, his $2 billion eight-hotel empire is based on a precise business model. "All these restaurants, all these bars, all this spectacular public space are there for one purpose," he says. "They sell the rooms. That’s where the money is."

The Hudson is a refuge for such people, and for all those who crave what is lacking in the city outside: the realization of contemporaneity in public, urban space. The Hudson transposes the street dynamic into a compact indoor version. Like it, hate it, like it, hate it.

Located at 356 West 58 West St., New York, New York, 10019. Tel no. (212) 554 6000. Rates: from US $95.