Wythe Hotel

Barrels were the first trade at the corner of Wythe Avenue and North 11th Street, from 1901. Speciality fabrics for NASA came next, which makes the hotel the building's third line of work and the first with any use for the view. Morris Adjmi Architects converted it without hiding where it came from: the heavy Southern yellow pine timbers stayed, and metal tracks still run across the lobby ceiling. Some bedrooms have arched windows in the old brick and timber boards overhead, and the Studio and Brooklyn Kings have 13-foot ceilings. From the lofts' floor-to-ceiling windows, Manhattan lines up across the East River with the Empire State Building in the middle.

Recommended for seeing New York from the Brooklyn side, the only side with Manhattan in the view. The room decides how much of it you get. The Manhattan View Kings have the skyline; the North 8th Loft adds a staircase to a private roof terrace over the river, and the Penthouse Loft, the largest, has two walls of windows on Manhattan and a terrace of its own. Children are welcome and some rooms connect. Le Crocodile cooks French classics from breakfast to dinner and sends the same menu upstairs, so a dozen oysters on ice, a baguette and the wine can go out on to the terrace. Brooklyn Bowl and Brooklyn Brewery are across the street, and the L train from Bedford Avenue, under ten minutes' walk, is one stop from Manhattan, should the view stop being enough.

Six floors up, Bar Blondeau pours spirits distilled in New York until late, and on Sunday afternoons it serves tea, with savoury toasts and pastries: a mild thing to be drinking in a building that began by making barrels.