Lifestyle -- 25 days ago
Words: Joseph Bullmore
There's a portrait of the French writer Charles Baudelaire in the lobby of the Fifth Avenue hotel, his face a mosaic of bits of paper and little pins and other, smaller photographs of the man himself. You can’t make out what’s in the frame at first. You need to take a moment, take a step back, to see it.
That’s almost certainly by design. Baudelaire is the spirit animal of the hotel, so to speak: an inspiration for its swoony, relaxed moody, thanks to his invention of the flaneur — that literary and artistic figure who took his time, stopped and smelled the roses, went at his own pace, took a step back. A dilettante. A loafer. An idler. A person of leisure. Which is funny, because New York itself does not lend itself to flaneurishness. It is hard to flan in the Big Apple. It is easier to err — to get caught up in the energy and hype and the sheer pace of life here. Stop in the traffic and you get mown down. Better to move with the madness.
Baudelaire would like the Fifth Avenue hotel. It is a place where the roses stop and come to you. It sometimes feels like living inside a lovely cake. The walls in our bedroom were a sort of peppermint green, like chocolate duck eggs at easter, and dotted with rich, dainty, colourful detail, as if decorated by a patissier.
The exterior is handsome and human in proportions — a nineteenth century mansion which recalls the European-ish pomp of the city’s gilded age. (Back then, it was part of the estate of Charlotte Goodridge, a fabled socialite). It reminds me of a Milanese bank. And it couldn’t be more welcome in this particular pocket of New York — a little whirlpool, in the mad tributary of central Manhattan, that they’re now branding as Flatiron NoMad.
"It sometimes feels like living inside a lovely cake..."
Once unloved and overlooked, an in-between space of bellowing taxi drivers and errant tourists, it is slowly developing an identity of its own — a sort of High Manhattan ideal which spans power offices, good squares, blue chip stores. What it never really had, however, was a properly great hotel. And The Fifth Avenue, planted resolutely on a corner — it came first, one sense, and the rest of the block came afterwards — feels like a definitive hotel. Hotelier Alex Ohebshalom’s family have owned it for almost half a century, and it feels like it’s taking its final form at just the right moment.
With a name and a facade like this, though, it’s hard to believe the Fifth Avenue hasn’t always been here. It’s nostalgic and old fashioned, without being derivative or shonkily retro. Didn’t Dorothy Parker drink a thousand martinis in the bar here? She couldn’t have, but she would have — and not just because the martinis are proper, honking, viscously chilled things. But also because The Portrait Bar, where they’re served, is a bookish triumph — its walls lined jauntily with eclectic, well, portraits, painted and sketched in a dozen eras and styles.
Martin Brudnizki, the high priest of modern maximalism, has done the work here. Londoners will know him for his mood-defining work in Annabel’s et al. But something about the swaddling, velveteen, detailed space feels more 5 Hertford Street to me — country house pomp and play. Charlotte Goodridge might well approve.
The restaurant, Café Carmellini, is similarly clubbish. Andrew Carmellini, who has helmed New York classics like Café Boulud and Lafayette over the years, is in charge here. The dining room, with its indoor trees, feels Grand Café-like, with an art deco exuberance that encourages long lunches. Opera-style box seats on a level above lend things another Gilded Age twist — the sort of places from which a dowager countess might cast judgement on the younger generation and their flashy spats below. Think oysters, shrimp salad, chicken fricassée, chunky steaks — all of them excellent.
Upstairs, through pink silk hallways, the rooms might have been designed by some great flaneur somewhere down the line — an eclectic curation of painted woods, animal prints, rich patterns and expert detailing. There is the sense that the various touchpoints and pieces of furniture might have been gathered from here and there — Tangiers, Paris, Vienna, Lisbon — with the omnivorous eye of the permanent saunterer. It is colourful and boudoirish, and distinctly different to the chill monochrome chic of many New York hotels.
The staff feel like cast members in this same parlour act. Our concierge was a charming, smiling, moustachioed character-actor of a man. Completely professional and yet winningly laidback. The rest were the same. It’s a hard trick to pull off for any hotel, let alone a pretty much new one. But this lot feel like they’ve been here for a while — and not in a Shining way.
In his essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, published in 1863, Baudelaire discusses the platonic ideal of the flaneur's art, as some imagined stroller pads around the crowded boulevards of Paris, rising up around them in all their Hausmann-era symmetry.
“To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world — impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define.” Of the world and yet a world unto itself; a home away from home. It might have been written specifically with a city like New York in mind. Or perhaps a place like The Fifth Avenue Hotel.
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