PRELUDE HIP HOTELS DECEMBER 2005

WORDS BY ORION RAY JONES

Hotel Gansevoort - Take a room with the style pack in NYC’s hip Meatpacking District.

Tucked away among the historic meat warehouses, cutting-edge art galleries, high-end fashion boutiques and trendy bars and clubs of Manhattan’s Meatpacking District lies a design hotel that fuses comfort and style in a way that has attracted the world’s most demanding travelers. The Hotel Gansevoort is perched above the rustic cobblestones of Ninth Avenue, which belie the sleek, contemporary design of the 14-floor, 187-room luxury hotel. Designed by noted architect Stephen B Jacobs and interior designer Andi Pepper, the building’s exterior is clad with zinc-colored metal panels, glass-sheathed balconies and projecting bay windows.

Greeting guests through the 14-foot-high revolving doors is an awe-inspiring lobby, with such design features as a two-story ceiling, chic, retro-styled furniture, eel-skin columns, mohair panels, and evolving lights that move up and down to create moods that vary with the time of day. Here, you are as likely to run into a jet-setting supermodel as a busy film crew eager to utilize the stunning interior.

The guest rooms are no less spectacular, sporting minimal yet friendly design that complements the true focal point of all the hotel’s design: the magnificent views of New York City and the Hudson River. A third of the rooms have balconies, and many feature cozy seating within the bay windows. Befitting a hotel of this caliber, the rooms are full of amenities, from WiFi (which is available throughout the hotel) to plasma and LCD TVs and a selection of hip, design-oriented magazines perfect for the style traveler.

Hotel Gansevoort’s signature feature is its wondrous rooftop. “Rooftops are the most underutilized real estate in the city,” says architect Stephen B Jacobs. And he has sought to reverse that with a roof that features a 45-foot heated pool (complete with underwater music), an intimate, richly landscaped garden, trendy bar and 360-degree view of the city.

The hotel’s name derives from one of New York’s oldest streets, which once served as a footpath for Native Americans and was later named for Greenwich Village’s Fort Gansvoort (which in turn was named for General Peter Gansevoort, a Revolutionary War hero and grandfather to Herman Melville). The Dutch words “gans,” meaning goose, and “voort,” meaning ahead, together denote the goose at the head of a flock of geese. And this style haven certainly is a leader of New York hotels.