New York’s most expensive hotel
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Aman Resort’s Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York has huge rooms, kilos of gold leaf, and is the epitome of luxury. A couple of blocks south of Central Park, the Fifth Avenue hotel opened on August 11, occupying floors seven to 14 of the 30-storey Crown Building, a 1921 landmark at 730 Fifth Avenue. Doronin was born in the Soviet Union, but now a Swedish citizen, founder of OKO Group, has spent $1.45bn restoring and converting the building into an 83-suite hotel and 22 residences most of which have been sold. Forty kilograms of 23-carat gold leaf to bring the reliefs on its facades back to their Beaux-Arts best.Parquet and tiled floors, which glitter with subtle brass inlay, and extravagant use of marble and basalt, bronze and blackened steel.
Belgium-born designer Gathy who transformed Qing-dynasty guest quarters of Beijing’s Summer Palace into an Aman has been designing Amans since the early 1990s. Reflecting pools, for firelight, immense, dramatically lit bathrooms with free-standing furniture, and huge oval baths what he calls “naughty bathrooms”, separated from the sleeping area by narrow, lit-from-within-screens that pivot according to the bather’s desire for privacy.
The best place for video calls is at the dressing table in the bathroom and a floor-standing cabinet out of which a television rises. In one corner there is a pedestal table and two armchairs, in another a buttoned day-bed, and copious wardrobe space at the foot of the bed the bedhead clad with buttery leather upholstery. The premier suite with 76m2 with a view across 57th Street into Bergdorf Goodman, costs $4, 600 per night excluding breakfast which is an additional $114.75 per person. The cheapest double room is $3, 567, the highest in the city.
A corner Suite costs $15, 000 payable on booking. There is an Arva restaurant dedicated to shared enjoyment and complicated flavours, which serves Italian dishes and salads made from ingredients that are sourced where possible within the state. Then the Japanese restaurant Omaskase counter is hewn from a single slab of fragrant hinoki wood.
There is a basement Jazz Club, even accessible from the street, and there is a spa that ranges across three floors and includes a 20-meter swimming pool surrounded by fireplaces. The Gym runs to a cryotherapy chamber, for those who want to expose themselves to temperatures of minus 110 ℃, a VacuTherm stepper, and treadmill, that emits infrared at you as you exercise and changing room showers that can be programmed to swathe the polar mist. A 14th-floor bar and restaurant where only guests, club members, and condo residents can get tables with acute knowledge of comfort.