Aman New York

At the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, the gilded crown of the Crown Building has marked the skyline of Midtown Manhattan since 1921. Its upper floors have been Aman New York since August 2022, the group's first hotel in the United States after Amangiri in Utah and Amangani in Wyoming, and its first city hotel in the Americas.

History

The building went up in 1921 as the Heckscher Building, designed by Warren & Wetmore, the architects of Grand Central Terminal, for the developer August Heckscher. In 1929 the newly founded Museum of Modern Art rented its first galleries on the twelfth floor, where it opened with an exhibition of Cezanne, Gauguin, Seurat and Van Gogh. The building was renamed the Crown Building in 1983 and the crown and the facade were regilded. In 2015 it was bought by a partnership that brought in Aman to convert the upper floors into a hotel and private residences. Construction took seven years and the hotel opened on 2 August 2022; the Aman residences above it followed.

Architecture and design

The exterior is French Renaissance in the Beaux-Arts manner, in limestone and terracotta, with the stepped roof and crown picked out in gold leaf. Jean-Michel Gathy of Denniston designed the interiors, keeping the Aman vocabulary of dark timber, screens and stone within a landmark that could not be altered outside. The hotel's main floor is on the fourteenth storey, where a double-height lobby lounge with a fireplace leads to a wraparound garden terrace open to the sky, a rare thing in Midtown. The spa occupies three floors below, and the jazz club is in the basement.

Rooms and suites

All 83 keys are suites, among the largest standard rooms in New York. Each has a working fireplace, a separate sitting area, a bathroom with a freestanding tub and a dressing room, and the design is a quiet mix of oak, Japanese screens and grey stone. The larger suites on the corners look along Fifth Avenue and over Central Park, two blocks north.

Dining

Arva, the Italian restaurant, cooks over wood and serves on the garden terrace in summer. Nama is the Japanese restaurant with a washoku menu and an omakase counter. The Jazz Club in the basement has a nightly programme and a late supper menu, and the Lounge on the fourteenth floor serves all day and takes afternoon tea. A cigar lounge and a wine library complete the set.

Wellness

The Aman Spa fills three floors with an indoor swimming pool of 20 metres with daybeds and fireplaces along one side, two spa houses with their own steam, sauna and plunge pools, a gym, and a programme of treatments that includes banya and hammam rituals. It is one of the largest hotel spas in Manhattan.

Weddings and events

The hotel hosts weddings and private events in a dedicated room on the fourteenth floor, in the Jazz Club, and on the garden terrace in the warmer months, which is the setting most couples ask for. Aman New York does not publish capacities; the terrace receptions and the Jazz Club dinners are for parties of modest size, and the whole hotel can be taken for a wedding weekend. Board meetings use the private dining rooms of Arva and Nama.

Location

The Crown Building stands at 730 Fifth Avenue, on the south-west corner of 57th Street, opposite Bergdorf Goodman and a block from Tiffany, with Central Park two blocks north and the Plaza across the avenue. The 57th Street subway stations of the F and the N, R and W lines are within two blocks, Grand Central Terminal is a ten-minute walk and Penn Station fifteen minutes by taxi. JFK airport is about an hour by car, LaGuardia about forty minutes and Newark an hour. Among the luxury hotels in New York, this is the one with a garden terrace at Fifth Avenue level above the street and a swimming pool a few floors below it.