The Marlton West 8th Street, Greenwich Village

One of my favorite parts of the city is the area I think of as Greenwich Village and the West Village together. They aren't the same. They sit next to each other and they're very walkable as a pair, but Greenwich Village is the one with the orderly block grid, right angles, sensible corners. You cross Sixth and you are suddenly in the West Village, which has acute and obtuse intersections, streets that run into each other at the wrong angles, and buildings that almost never go above three or four stories. There is more to say about both, and I will say it in a future dispatch, but for now the relevant fact is that the West Village doesn't really have any good hotels. The buildings aren't big enough for them.

The good news is that just over Sixth, in Greenwich Village proper, there is The Marlton.

Hotels in New York are often trying to be grand. They are designed for tourists and business travelers, which means big rooms, big lobbies, the kind of contemporary interior design that reads as clean and ends up sterile. The Marlton is the opposite. It feels like it belongs to its block on West 8th Street rather than imposing itself on it. It's a boutique hotel, around a hundred rooms, in a building that's been there since 1900, and the renovation has been done with enough restraint that you can still feel the age of the place. Most New York hotels aren't warm. This one is.

What The Marlton gets right, more than anything, is proportion. The lobby is small. The sitting room off the lobby has a fireplace and you actually want to sit in it. It feels like a New York designed space cross-bred with an English cottage room and given a small amount of edge, and the result is a velvety, comfortable living room that is not trying to do too much. You can have breakfast in it. You can drink coffee and read in it. You can sit there before you go out and have the conversation about what you're going to do that night, which in my experience is one of the best parts of being on a trip.

Off of that is the bar. The shorthand is: pre-war New York supper club meets Edwardian saloon, which is to say turn-of-the-last-century British. Dark wood, mirrors, brass fittings, a long marble bar, velvet stools with nailhead trim, a coffered dark ceiling. You sit down meaning to have one drink and end up canceling your dinner.

And if you do cancel, there is the dining room behind the bar. I haven't eaten there yet. The list of restaurants I still need to get to in Greenwich and the West Village is too long, and The Marlton's keeps getting bumped by something a four-minute walk away. But the room is a continental supper club crossed with an old New York theater district restaurant. Curved red velvet banquettes. Coffered metallic ceiling. Silk-shaded sconces. You have a martini at the bar, get told your table is ready, sink into the banquette, and somewhere in the third hour decide it would be reasonable to order a bottle of champagne.

The bedrooms are small. This is a New York hotel and you will feel that. But the design choices are the right ones for the size: white walls, high ceilings, a tall upholstered headboard, mirrored wardrobe doors that double the room. The effect is a small Parisian apartment. It isn't a room you spend the day in. It's a room you sleep in and feel pleased about.

The reason to stay at The Marlton, and the reason it's one of my favorite hotels in the city, is the feeling that you live in Greenwich Village for a few days. Not that you are visiting it from a hotel, but that you live there, and that your apartment happens to come with an English cottage sitting room, an Edwardian bar, and a Parisian brasserie attached. You step out the front door and you are on West 8th Street. You walk in any direction and you are in the part of New York that other parts of New York are pretending to be. You're not really in a hotel. You're in Greenwich Village for three nights, with a key.