The Greenwich Hotel

The pool at The Greenwich Hotel lies beneath the timbers of a Japanese farmhouse. The wooden frame, some two centuries old, was taken apart in Japan, shipped to New York and put back together below a hotel in Tribeca, where it shelters the swimming pool of the Shibui Spa. That detail says much about the house: personal, built slowly and full of things made by hand.

History

The hotel opened in 2008 on Greenwich Street, at the corner of North Moore Street, in the neighbourhood that Robert De Niro has made his own. De Niro owns it with the hoteliers Ira Drukier and Richard Born. It stands next door to the Tribeca Film Center, which De Niro and Jane Rosenthal opened in 1988 in a converted coffee warehouse, with Tribeca Grill on its ground floor. The Tribeca Film Festival, founded in 2002 by De Niro, Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff to bring people back to Lower Manhattan after the attacks of September 2001, has its base in the same streets.

Architecture and design

The building was designed to look as if it had always been there, in brick with tall windows that match the warehouses of the street. Inside, no two rooms are alike. The public spaces centre on a drawing room with a fireplace and sofas where guests read, work and take drinks, and on an interior courtyard garden laid out in an Italian spirit, where breakfast is served in fine weather. Throughout the house the materials are natural and worn: reclaimed timber, brick, leather, handmade tiles and rugs.

Rooms and suites

Each room has its own layout and furniture, and the bathrooms are the large, tiled kind more usual in private houses. Some rooms open onto the courtyard and have small terraces of their own. The penthouse, designed with the Belgian designer and antiques dealer Axel Vervoordt, crowns the building, with terraces looking over the rooftops of Tribeca towards the Hudson.

Dining

Locanda Verde, run by the chef Andrew Carmellini, fills the corner of the building and has been one of Tribeca's busiest restaurants since it opened in 2009. Its Italian menu runs through breakfast, lunch and dinner, and its sheep's milk ricotta and morning pastries are as much a part of the neighbourhood as the bar. Hotel guests also have the drawing room and courtyard for drinks and lighter meals.

Wellness

The Shibui Spa, under the farmhouse frame, has treatment rooms, a relaxation area and the pool itself, kept warm and lit low. Its treatments draw on Japanese bathing traditions, and the hush of the space, two floors below one of the busier streets of Tribeca, makes it one of the most unusual rooms in any New York hotel.

Weddings and events

The hotel suits small gatherings rather than large functions: private dinners, intimate wedding celebrations and meetings for a modest number of guests. The drawing room, the courtyard and the penthouse have all been used for private events.

Location

Tribeca is one of Manhattan's quietest neighbourhoods, a grid of cobbled side streets and nineteenth-century warehouses turned into lofts. The Greenwich Hotel is close to Hudson River Park, to the restaurants of Franklin and Duane Streets and to SoHo, just north of Canal Street. Few addresses offer a luxury hotel in New York with so much of the feeling of a residential street. Franklin Street station on the 1 line is two blocks east, and Chambers Street gives access to more lines.