A Visit to the Smyth Hotel

Howard Roark, disguised as Gary Cooper, imagines the future.

Creative Director Ed Calabrese, along with Lisa Contreras, leads Mancini•Duffy’s Retail Group, whose award-winning interiors include work for Bloomingdale’s and Bliss across the country, as well as Saks Fifth Avenue’s third floor at their Manhattan flagship, unveiled in late 2009. In his career of thirty years in the industry, Ed has overseen hundreds of retail and hospitality projects from New York to Barcelona to Doha to Warsaw to Jakarta to Boca Raton – so this man should know what he’s talking about. (Mary)

On a recent evening, I toured the Smyth Hotel at 85 West Broadway at Chambers Street with a small group from the AIANY Architecture of Hospitality Committee. As a boutique hotel and condominium, it’s successful and has all the requisite bells and whistles. There were some really good details and hardware throughout, and some of the best-designed bathrooms I’ve seen.

The building was designed by BBG-BBGM, with interiors by Yabu Pushelberg. The lobby is dark, with oiled steel, wenge wood panels, and brown leather; a vaulted ceiling clad in a mosaic tile adds some interest. Like so many of these hotels, the bar and lobby space are the same. This trend goes back to the days when Morgans Hotel and the Royalton were the hotspots and revived hotel spaces as destinations.

The guestrooms, designed by Richardson Sadeki, were nice. The way the details fit together like a Swiss watch was impressive. The bathrooms are compartmented but there’s no real wall between the bath and the bedroom – there’s a frosted glass partition and that’s it. Not for sharing with the shy or prudish. The furniture was textbook retro, all beige with one red wool lounge chair (for punch, I guess), with the requisite wenge wood panel behind the bed and the plasma-screen TV. They didn’t skimp on materials: everything was top quality, with all the textiles in raw silk, wool, and glove leather.

We were shown the penthouse, which is a 1200-square-foot two-bedroom apartment for sale at $7 million. There is a great floating-glass stair (very Howard Roark) up to the terrace, which is on the apartment’s roof. Of course, there was one of those Italian kitchens, where the refrigerator is a series of drawers and everything is sleek, requiring a contract with Windex. I loved the view from the corner living room, where you could see all the way uptown and, to the west, the Hudson and Goldman Sachs.

For some exterior photos, go here.