When walking down the leafy sidewalk of SoHo’s Thompson Street, it’s fairly easy to miss The Manner. Sure, the hotel is one of the neighborhood’s buzziest new openings in years, having recently hosted fashion week parties for Coach and Off-White (the latter even bringing Madonna through its doors) before it officially opened at the end of September. But to the average passerby—or even to me, when I pulled up to its entrance from the airport on an unseasonably warm afternoon earlier this month—it looks more like a ritzy apartment building from the outside than, well, a hotel. (There’s no big, flashy sign: just a discrete but smartly-dressed doorman or two, and a smattering of well-heeled guests sipping cocktails behind the bushes that surround the outdoor terrace.) For a hotel that’s already making a splash, the way it presents itself to the outside world seems remarkably restrained.
Photo: Chris Mottalini
Once you step inside, however, you’ll quickly learn that “restrained” is not the operative word here—quite the opposite, in fact. Entering the lobby, your eye is led from the sleek golden fireplace across the lavishly marbled floors sliced into vaguely astrological patterns to a pair of globular totemic sculptures by the Danish artist Nicholas Shurey. Before I could gawp too long at the fabulously retro water feature by the check-in desk—with its diamond-shaped metal spouts and speckled granite panels, it could be straight out of a chichi office building in 1970s Milan—I’m quickly whisked up by one of the front desk staff (dressed in a sleek outfit designed by Michael Halpern, nonetheless) to my fifth-floor suite, a riot of color that comes together to form a strangely pleasing whole. Every wall is either mirrored or painted in an eye-popping shade of shiny, egg-yolk yellow, accented with glossy mahogany, hot red cabinets, and slivers of gold. Think Gio Ponti on acid, with a dash of classic New York, Studio 54-worthy glitz.
