With luck, we’ll find out.įood and drink: The James is the new home for Scarpetta, the acclaimed modern Italian restaurant that made a splash with its signature tomato, basil spaghetti in the Meatpacking District in 2008. I’d love to see what he’d do with the Tiffany skylight, which disappeared with the current renovation. Kudos to designer Thomas Juul-Hansen, the Copenhagen-born New Yorker who did a masterful job of fitting a contemporary hotel into an Age of Innocence building. The clubby subterranean Seville Bar delivers an added historical flourish, if in name only. The building’s magnificent windows also backdrop the stylish bar at Scarpetta, the upscale Italian restaurant that relocated to the James from the Meatpacking District. With painted industrial columns and a gorgeous chevron-patterned wood ceiling, the room is equal parts comfort and chic, boasting soothing colors, multiple seating areas and cushioned window seats in front of the arched Beaux Arts windows, ideal for working a laptop. I like how the lobby sums up the hotel’s style. And yes, with its built in cool and laid-back luxury the James is more in sync with NoMad today than the more formal Carlton. After almost a year of refurbishment without closing its doors, the James NoMad emerged self-confident and contemporary with a new entrance on 29th Street, a living room-style lobby with midcentury-inflected furniture and 360 rooms, from snug to sprawling, where the bespoke mid-century influences include eye-catching grated brass minibars straight out of Mad Men. That year it also underwent a $60 million reboot overseen by David Rockwell that glamorized the premises, unveiled a breathtaking Tiffany stained glass skylight and brought a splash of aspirational luxury a neighborhood in transition.įast forward to February 2018. Tumbling downmarket like its surroundings during the Depression, the hotel was resuscitated in 1987 as the Carlton and in 2005, ushered onto the National Registry of Historic Places. Opened in 1904 as the Hotel Seville, it housed a white-glove property reflecting its Gilded Age neighborhood where grande dames like Edith Wharton and Elsie de Wolfe felt at home. At a glance: The James NoMad is a case study in how rapidly NoMad, a once gritty neighborhood north of Madison Park, became desirable.Ĭonsider the history of the striking brick and limestone Beaux Arts building the hotel occupies.
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