Why New York’s historic hotels are the hot picks for 2025

Couples pore over truffle omelette brunches and their sightseeing plans as a woman feeds Catskills salmon to the poodle beneath her wingback dining chair. They’re in the Clement, the ground-floor restaurant at the Peninsula, a luxury hotel in Midtown Manhattan. The salmon costs £29 a plate.

In the foyer of the hotel New Yorkers know as “the Pen”, and which is fresh from a ten-month renovation, a chandelier twinkles above a double marble staircase and soft jazz is faintly audible as the doorman Louis, dressed in a gold-trimmed waistcoat and bowler hat, asks me cheerfully: “Hey miss, how’s ya mornin’?”

It all seems a hundred miles away from the scenes outside on Fifth Avenue, where a crowd waves Maga flags in front of Trump Tower and shoppers throng into Louis Vuitton’s New York flagship store. It could be a hundred years ago too, which is very much the point.

I’m here to see the transformation of three New York grandes dames: the Peninsula; storied 1920s hotel the Surrey on the Upper East Side; and, the pièce de résistance, the New York landmark Waldorf Astoria, which reopens in spring after a £1.5 billion renovation. All three of these major renovations are leaning in heavily to the hotels’ Twenties and Thirties heritage. They’re doing so against a backdrop of ever-stiffer competition for luxury travellers. A record number of luxury hotels launched in New York in 2024, according to the management consultancy Arthur D Little, and the number of luxury hotel rooms is due to swell from the current 1.6 million to 1.9 million in 2030. As New Yorkers put it: you have to work your assets, kiddo, to win in the luxury hospitality game.

Back in the 1920s, the Peninsula was the Gotham: a Midtown hotel where socialites and business tycoons in brown derbies hobnobbed in its cocktail lounge or would rendezvous among the fronds in its all-the-rage palm court (examples of which were also seen at the Ritz and on the ill-fated Titanic).

Receptionist Anisha Chhetri tells me that the Pen’s recent 1920s-style “do-over”, which was led by the New York design firm Bill Rooney Studio and unveiled last September, has been a hit with hotel guests. “Foreign clients like to get a feel of the history of New York and the part this hotel played in that history,” she says.

Sadly there’s no remnant of the Gotham’s 1930s dining room, blood-red and Doric-columned, or the foyer telegraph and writing room, which was a much-loved feature in the 1910s. However, the palm court has been returned to its former glory, and forms the mezzanine heart of the C-shaped building, with a rank of queen palms and a new triptych by the Mexican artist Ricardo Mazal. A “refresh” of the hotel’s 219 rooms and suites, meanwhile, emphasises original features such as picture windows, columns and cornicing, with new etched glasswork and moulded headboards and Quagliotti bed linen.

Using history as a selling point used to be the preserve of European country house hotels, with their brochures trumpeting art collections and aristocratic former residents. These days, hotels worldwide are focusing on heritage as a USP, putting their legacy, and that of the buildings they occupy, front and centre. The buzzword is “restoration”, with hoteliers unmasking original features such as art deco geometrics and 19th-century marble and frescoes — and in some cases restoring properties in line with 19th and early 20th-century floor plans.

Twenty blocks north, on East 76th Street and Madison Avenue, is another New York institution: the Surrey. It reopened in October after a four-year, £116 million renovation by the British property billionaires the Reuben brothers, under the management of the Maltese luxury hotel brand Corinthia (room-only doubles from £855; corinthia.com). Built in 1926, the Surrey was once the New York bolt hole of the actress Bette Davis, and in the 1940s John F Kennedy kept a suite here (rumoured to be for his romantic trysts). The 2024 remodelling takes the hotel from its former 198 rooms and suites to 70 more spacious hotel guest rooms, 34 suites and 14 residences. It also restores the Surrey’s original horseshoe ground-floor layout, with the central front desk and concierge recognisable from posh New York apartment blocks. On one side is a restaurant and on the other a lounge, both under the management of Casa Tua, which also has outposts in Paris, Aspen and Miami.

When I visit on a blustery autumn morning, this Casa Tua Mediterranean restaurant is abuzz with Upper East Siders nibbling aged prosciutto and rocket salads beneath fierce hairdos with the requisite handbag dogs. I snoop at a bright deluxe king room, which features art deco arch tiles and light sconces, satin wall panelling and — in a welcome mid-century revival — miniature illuminated vanity tables in the dead entrance spaces where suitcase stands are usually plonked.

Mortals who can’t afford the Surrey’s eye-popping room rate can hang out at the lounge, also run by Casa Tua, which is filled with pop art (a pouting Marilyn Monroe) and Nineties photos (Kate Moss in her underwear) and features retro-style Italian furniture. It serves Milanese-grade cappuccinos and potent martinis to all-comers from 7am to 7pm daily, before closing for residents’ use.

In the heart of Midtown, the Waldorf Astoria, today in the Hilton stable, is the most famous grande dame of all (room-only doubles from £1,641; hilton.com). It began life as two separate hotels: the Waldorf, built in 1893 on Fifth Avenue by William Waldorf Astor; and the neighbouring Astoria, erected in 1897 by his cousin and arch rival John Jacob Astor IV. In 1931, when rifts were healed and the original site had been sold off to the developers of the Empire State Building, the current day Waldorf Astoria opened on Park Avenue. The 47-storey, art deco landmark was a wonder of its age, giving us hospitality staples, for the first time ever, such as in-room dining, en suite bathrooms, a switchboard for internal calls and electricity in every room (not to mention Waldorf salad and thousand island dressing, which are said to have been invented here).

The hotel’s managing director, Luigi Romaniello, and the architect Elizabeth Kubany gave The Sunday Times an exclusive first look at the eight-year renovation of this 70,000 sq ft site, which occupies a full block between Park and Lexington Avenues and 49th and 50th streets.

We stroll in hard hats through the vast marble Park Lane and Clock lobbies to the Silver Corridor, where a series of friezes of goddesses representing the seasons are being restored to their original blue and green colours. It’s not just a century’s worth of cigar smoke being sloughed off, Romaniello tells me. The renovation will also transform the Starlight Ballroom, where Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra performed, into a swimming pool called the Starlight Pool and it will restore treasured fixtures and fittings such as the 3m winged Spirit of Achievement statue that presides over the Park Avenue entrance, and the Steinway piano on which the long-time resident Cole Porter wrote standards such as Anything Goes and I Get a Kick Out of You.

The 1930s ground-floor layout, with its block-to-block promenade from Park to Lexington Avenue, and its double-width transverse galleries, will be reinstated from 1929 plans, Kubany says. “The width accommodated the massive skirts worn by the fabulous people who came here to be seen for events like the Met Gala,” she says, adding: “It’s going to be quite something.”

Back at the Peninsula, the rooftop bar has been relaunched as Pen Top, a cocktail bar and terrace that honours the site’s history as one of the first rooftop bars in this city of rooftop bars (launched as the Sun Deck in 1933). Pen Top’s terrace is thronged this evening: with young lovers taking in the wraparound Manhattan views and East Asian tourists drawn by the Peninsula brand. I raise a moonlighter, Pen Top’s bestselling take on a whisky sour, to the big beasts of the Manhattan hotel scene and all they have seen. As the New York luxury hotel dweller Bette Davis put it: “That’s me. An old kazoo with some sparklers.”

Sally Howard