The Best Hotels in New York, by the Record
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Sand between your toes is apparently a design philosophy here, not just an oversight. Marram is a 96-room resort in Montauk built around the idea that "barefoot luxury" is a complete sentence, leaning into the town's old surfer looseness rather than polishing it away. Yoga, craft workshops, and weathered-cool décor all pull in the same direction. The in-house restaurant from a Uruguayan chef does seafood and is worth your attention.
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A hotel in Midtown that leans hard into the Irish pub aesthetic, Merrion Row sits one block from Times Square, which is either a selling point or a warning depending on your relationship with costumed characters. The rooms take their cues from Dublin's warmer traditions, which makes the whole thing feel less like a theme and more like an antidote. The elevator does the heavy lifting between the city outside and the calm within.
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Old money meets boutique hotel money at this Lake Montauk resort, where whitewashed timber rooms and two pools sit on a marina that Gilded Age dynasties once claimed as their own. The setting feels genuinely private in a way that most of the Hamptons stopped being long ago. A beach club, tennis, fitness classes, a wood-fired pizzeria, and a seafood fine-dining room round things out. Pack light, but bring something for dinner.
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Rooms here are styled after the classic North Brooklyn apartment, which sounds like damning with faint praise until you see the hardwood floors, the kitchenettes, and the art books chosen with actual care. This boutique hotel in Williamsburg keeps an in-house gallery for good measure, since framed prints apparently weren't enough. Union Pool is steps away, so you'll know by midnight whether that's a selling point or a warning.
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A boutique hotel planted deep in Washington Heights, well over 100 blocks north of where Manhattan's design-conscious lodging usually stops. The building announces itself in color from the outside, and the interiors keep that energy going in a contemporary style that feels deliberate rather than decorative. It's the only stylish option in a neighborhood that doubles as the heart of New York's Dominican community, which is a reasonable argument for staying up here.
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John Cage's 4'33" is a listed design inspiration, which tells you most of what you need to know about this minimalist hotel on the Bowery. Rooms are bento-box small but composed with care, and the bigger configurations fit a whole touring band. A rooftop bar on the 11th floor and a garden-patio restaurant downstairs mean you don't have to wander far, though the Lower East Side makes wandering very easy.
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A boutique hotel in Montclair that feels more like a very well-appointed Greenwich Village townhouse than anything you'd expect twelve miles into New Jersey. Bobbi Brown, who traded her cosmetics empire for a second act in hospitality, serves as creative director, and the rooms carry that same instinct for color and texture. The kind of place that makes a weekend in the suburbs feel like an actual idea.
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Rooms that look like a glamorous private residence someone actually lives in, not a set dressed to suggest one. The Manner is a boutique hotel on Thompson Street that trades the minimalist downtown look, and its beige "quiet luxury" cousin, for richly colored, heavily textured interiors. The ground-floor restaurant and cocktail bar pull in their own crowd, but the hotel itself stays on the discreet side of the equation.
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A Turkish hammam and a mosaic-lined pool tucked beneath a Beaux Arts tower on 32nd Street is about as New York a contradiction as you'll find. The Marmara Park Avenue is a 128-room luxury hotel where designer Joe Ginsberg's taste runs the show: brass-inlaid concrete floors, Mylar wall coverings, velvet everywhere, and custom wallpaper drawn from his own photographs of a Bronx bridge. The Michelin Guide has it among its selected hotels.
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The restaurant sits on the 42nd and 43rd floors, which tells you something about this hotel's ambitions. The Opus Westchester is a sleek, modernist tower in White Plains that reads more Midtown Manhattan than Hudson Valley commuter town, which is presumably the point. Views stretch across Long Island Sound and back toward the New York skyline. The spa has an indoor pool and a lounge deck for when the views stop being enough.
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Crescent Beach sits right outside the door here, with Peconic Bay stretching out beyond it, and the Pridwin has been around forever. It reads more like an Adirondack lodge than a beach resort, which is either confusing or exactly right depending on your mood. The 49 rooms and scattered cottages have been renovated to keep the old bones while adding a cleaner, more considered feel. Shelter Island itself requires a ferry, which keeps the crowds honest.
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Five acres in Amagansett, which sits just past East Hampton for those who find East Hampton a little much. The Reform Club is a small luxury inn where the smallest room in the main house is a suite, cottages offer more seclusion, and a four-bedroom residence handles groups wanting to pretend they live here. Bvlgari amenities, owners' artwork on the walls, Pilates on the schedule. The Meeting House feeds guests and locals alike, which keeps it from feeling sealed off.
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A barn and a cluster of 17th and 18th century cottages, beautifully preserved outside and quietly gutted into something minimalist and linen-forward within. This small hotel sits a mile inland from the beach on two pastoral acres, which makes it the anti-Hamptons Hamptons option, no oceanfront scene to perform for. Frette sheets, Matouk towels, Nespresso on the counter, old bones with a very considered interior. The Michelin Guide lists it among its selected hotels.
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Sagaponack is the Hamptons village that people in the know prefer precisely because it isn't a scene. This freshly renovated resort spreads across seven acres with 30 rooms ranging from detached bungalows with kitchenettes to suites, all done in white, navy, and sage. Beach passes, stocked lockers, and a pantry stocked with morning pastries to ice cream handle the logistics so you don't have to. Long Island's best beaches are close enough to walk.
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Pastels and soft watercolors replace the old primary-color scheme after a Rockwell Group renovation, which is genuinely good news when you're sleeping a few floors above Midtown's noise machine. The Time New York is a boutique-ish hotel a short walk from Times Square, with rooms that are compact but quietly pulled together, Frette linens, Margiela bathrobes, and suites for when compact just won't do.
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A hotel in NoMad that resisted the obvious mid-century modern temptation and landed somewhere more current: hardwood floors, live plants, barn-style room dividers, and contemporary art that earns its wall space. The rooftop Pool Club is the kind of amenity that actually changes your afternoon plans. The Michelin Guide selects it, and the location puts most of Manhattan within easy reach without much effort.
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Floor-to-ceiling windows face the Manhattan skyline across the Hudson, which is about as pointed a statement as a hotel can make without saying a word. The W Hoboken is a full-service hotel with the brand's signature bold graphics, loud color, and buzzy public spaces, plus a spa and fitness center for the morning after. Halifax handles the seafood side, and the Living Room bar runs craft cocktails with live music.
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A glass-encased walkway with water cascading around you is the first thing that happens, which sets the tone for a hotel that seems determined to pretend Times Square isn't happening outside. The seventh-floor lobby is all-white and calm, a minor act of defiance against the chaos below. It's still a W in the middle of the tourist vortex, but the interior makes a reasonable case for ignoring that entirely.
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The Art Deco murals were under plaster for years while the restoration crew worked, which is its own kind of story. Now back on Park Avenue after a long absence, the Waldorf Astoria is a grand full-service hotel with residential-style suites, the Guerlain Spa, and a brasserie from chef Michael Anthony. The public spaces are the main event: silver corridors, soaring ceilings, and a Grand Ballroom that still knows exactly what it is.
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The name "Theta" does hint at a quieter frequency than the surrounding blocks would suggest. This Kimpton hotel on 8th Avenue puts you a short walk from the Theater District, Hell's Kitchen, and the Rockefeller Center chaos, which makes it a practical midtown base without requiring you to sleep directly under a billboard. The 364 rooms lean calm and polished in the way the Kimpton brand tends to, a reliable counterpoint to the neighborhood's volume.
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