The Marlton Hotel and Margaux, New York City

Are there any single room occupancy “hotels” in New York anymore? They’ve been romanced and renovated out of all recognition. “Ooh, this is where Allen Ginsberg took acid and made out with such and such.” “And so-and-so stabbed someone in the stairwell right here.” While there are scores of places across Manhattan that have a rose tinted, misremembered bohemian heritage more legitimately associated with starving artists living in chilly garrets in Toulouse-Lautrec’s Paris, the truth is that most of these places weren’t where you went to write the Great American Novel; they were where you ended up with your half-blind dog, cooking a tin of beans over a camping hob, contemplating suicide on your soiled candlewick bedspread while a bunch of giant cockroaches put on a twitchy production of West Side Story in the sink.

Well, yesteryear’s single room occupancy hotel is today’s boutique hotel. And while Jack Kerouac’s name is being bandied about as one of The Marlton Hotel’s most famous previous tenants, you probably wouldn’t have wanted to stay here when he was in residence. Today it’s a different story. Even if you aren’t staying here, you may well want to be here…

The new look Marlton Hotel opened in October 2013 and had within months become the default clubhouse for the downtown fashion crowd. Hotelier Sean Macpherson (whose previous projects include The Jane, The Bowery and Maritime… gosh, remember when that was the place?) may have engineered the scene here, but it’s grown organically and apace: Warhol muse Paige Powell stays upstairs during her regular art safaris from Portland, Oregon, while Olivier Theyskens celebrates birthdays in the ground floor restaurant, Margaux.

On a Wednesday and Thursday night, the lobby – which resembles a handsome, freshly minted Mayfair gentleman’s club with an espresso bar on the side – seems like the only place to be in Greenwich Village. During the day, laptoppers tap away at novels in progress, making a herbal infusion last all afternoon. Kerouac would have curled his lip.

We like The Marlton. There might be a touch of ’tude from the staff at reception, which you wouldn’t get from the well oiled cogs at the Park Hyatt or Four Seasons, and the rooms are tiny – but if you know what you’re letting yourself in for, this is one of the best hotels to open in Lower Manhattan in some time.

There isn’t any of the vulgarity that this might suggest – there are none of the horrors of the Plaza Hotel

As you make you way from the lift doors out onto a postage-stamp sized landing, into the hallway and through to your bedroom, you realize just how much of a premium is placed on space here. But the rooms themselves are chic – the concept was to take the palace hotel style of the likes of the Ritz in Paris and shrink it down. There isn’t any of the vulgarity that this might suggest – there are none of the horrors of the Plaza Hotel, with its Arabic gold-on-gold tat, stuffed into volumes that can’t absorb it. There is a whitewashed, calm kind of plush, with ornate plaster ceiling details, meticulous bathrooms and graphic, modernist Serge Mouille three-armed ceiling lamps.

Yes, the rooms at the Marlton Hotel are petite – you wouldn’t want to settle in them for a whole summer – but for a long weekend or a six day stay, they are perfectly formed and in one of the best downtown locations imaginable (around the corner from Washington Square and right across the street from Stumptown Coffee’s latest outpost).

The backlash has, of course, already begun: “Oh God, I went last night and the food was horrible! And it’s so full of fashion people”

The engine of cool powering The Marlton is Margaux, the restaurant tucked away at the back of the ground floor. The backlash has, of course, already begun: “Oh God, I went last night and the food was horrible! And it’s so full of fashion people,” we were told by a friend (very much “in fashion” himself) last week. Our experiences have been different. We love the space at Margaux – there’s natural daylight in the back and plenty of booths elsewhere. It’s a restaurant with a good social flow, and lots of buzz. The menu dips one small toe into the Middle East (kale, meet harissa), and there are some standout dishes – arctic char with peas (sorry, “English peas”), black trumpets and horseradish is delicious. You can go small with your plates, or you can go for starters and mains. One piece of advice: don’t go for the vegetable curry with chickpeas and lentils. The “vegetable” is 95% potato. Basically, it’s potato and chickpeas – a rubbish combination that even Pierre Gagnaire couldn’t do something with – strewn with watercress and held together by tomato gloop. If this is a curry, we’re Marie of Romania.

If the hotel itself is a baby version of the Ritz or George V, then the Margaux looks like a scaled-down Chiltern Fire House. And while we might be in haute Fashion Territory here, at least we aren’t experiencing the “reservations lockdown” that Andre Balazs’ staff have so hilariously announced at his London hotel. Nor will you wait an hour here for a latte at breakfast (Andre – you really need to sort that out.)

The “baby grand” Marlton Hotel is definitely having a moment. Whether it proves to be a long running Chateau Marmont moment or something more fleeting remains to be seen. But $180 (including breakfast) to be in the midst of something this happening, in this neighbourhood, is a steal. C

The Marlton Hotel, 5 W 8^th Street, New York, NY 10011, USA
+1 212 321 0100; marltonhotel.com