The Hotel Gansevoort in New York City’s Meatpacking District made quite a nightlife splash when it came onto the scene in 2004, and now the folks behind the trendy hotel mini-chain have brought us what they hope will be the next big hotel thing: Gansevoort Park Avenue, on the corner of East 29th Street and Park Avenue South.
The uptown hotel had its soft opening a few weeks back, and will fully open this fall (140 of 249 rooms are open, and a restaurant and two bars are still in the works). We got an inside look of the hotel yesterday and snapped photos of every nook and cranny, which we’re sharing with you below.
The front desk, seen above, greets you as you come through the revolving door into the lobby.
The lobby decor is simple but fun — striped chairs, high-backed Alice-in-Wonderland-like couches, metal treestumps as tables, and black-and-white houndstooth chairs.
The best design feature of the lobby is the funky purple chandeliers hanging from the ceiling (three in total).
Above is a Grand Deluxe Room, the nicest room below the suite level rooms (Superior Rooms are the hotel’s standard rooms, and there are also Deluxe King and Deluxe Double Rooms). Each room has a flatscreen TV, and 8GB iPod pre-loaded with music, an iPod docking station, free Wi-Fi, a mini-bar stocked with treats from Dylan’s Candy Bar, and a bed with a feather bed, down duvet, down pillows, and 400 thread count sheets.
The large, attractive bathrooms have a shower, a separate tub (hidden behind the door in the above photo), and Cutler bath products. There’s also a kit from The Art of Shaving available for a fee (like an extension of the mini-bar).
Park Suites are all corner rooms with a bedroom and separate living room (which has a bar area and a guest bathroom). The bedrooms of these suites have balconies on two sides, one overlooking 29th Street and one overlooking Park Avenue South (they’re extremely narrow, but it’s still a nice touch).
The Plunge pool deck is a point of pride for the hotel, and deservedly so. The pool is a decent size, it’s heated, and there’s plenty of seating. Plus the views — including a good one of the Empire State Building — really add to the experience.
Sex is a recurring theme throughout the hotel. In addition to this pin-up who’s pinned to the bottom of the pool, the two guest rooms I saw both had gratuitously sexy photos framed and hanging on the walls (both were of a man and a woman making out, hardcore).
Lounge chairs at the pool.
The hotel is expecting the Plunge lounge area, just off the pool deck, to be one of the hotel’s main centers of nightlife. Until the restaurant opens, Plunge is serving breakfast to guests, who can take their food out to the pool deck if they like.
Plunge includes a small outside area. A nice touch is the glass panels in the terrace’s floor, which allow guests to peer down to the street, 19 stories below.
From Plunge, guests can take a staircase up one flight to the hotel’s roofdeck, where there are plenty of lounge chairs for those who want to lay in the sun, as well as a bar and plenty of little tables set up for nightlife (a great space for rooftop events).
The hotel has no shortage of bars and nightlife areas (even with two of the main spaces still on the way), and this sexy bar is considered the physical centerpiece of it all. I counted four big nightlight areas already open (Plunge, The Red Room – shown below, the area to the left of this bar which isn’t pictured, and the rooftop). Twenty 33, on 29th Street attached to the hotel lobby, and The Blue Room, which will be above the bar seen here, are both expected to open in a few months.
Guests can exit Plunge and take a staircase one level down to the sexy lady bar. This aerial shot shows the chandeliers over the bar, taken on the way out of Plunge.
The Red Room is one of the hotel’s big bar areas. It’s directly to the right of the kissing lady bar, and its doors can be kept open to create one large space, or the doors can be closed for private events.
The entrance to the hotel is on East 29th Street, just off of Park Avenue South — a very unassuming location for such a hip hotel. One big difference about this hotel, as compared to the original Gansevoort, is that those arriving for the nightlife can use a separate entrance on Park Avenue, leaving the above entrance (and lobby) to hotel guests who don’t necessarily want to be in the center of the action (the concept of the original hotel was all party, all the time).
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