Crosby Street Hotel

The courtyard in the middle of Crosby Street Hotel is called the Sculpture Garden, and its centrepiece is the bare trunk of a great tree, set in a steel ring and hung with lanterns and balls of woven twig over cushions striped pink and white. Around it the hotel rises eleven floors in red brick, built in 2009 by Stonehill & Taylor, with windows that run floor to ceiling in the rooms. Kit Kemp did the inside, and beige never came up: a blue floral headboard with an orange bench at its foot and the brick of the street beyond the glass, or a suite papered in green stripes with a water tower in its arched windows. The Drawing Room is for guests alone, with an honesty bar at any hour, and from five until six every day the Champagne and canapés are on the house.

Recommended for couples who want SoHo at the door and somewhere quiet to retreat from it, which is what guests' reviews praise: the hush inside, against the bustle outside. The hotel takes children, with cots and babysitting, but with no pool and no kids club it is built for grown-ups. The boutiques of Prince and Spring Streets start at the door, and Balthazar is half a block away. Chinatown and Little Italy are under ten minutes on foot, and Broadway-Lafayette station three, for anywhere further. Then back for five o'clock and the Champagne, and after it the Crosby Bar's ivy-hung terrace, or on a Sunday a film in the screening room, in rows of red seats. For all the Sculpture Garden inside, the sculpture everybody sees is out on the pavement: Fernando Botero's bronze cat by the door, which Kit Kemp calls the hotel's gift to the city.