newelty

First off, that joke isn’t mine–it’s how they sign your checkout paperwork at the Ace Hotel: Thanks for sleeping with us xox –Ace

Can you believe that no one has been savvy enough (or sassy enough) to use that before? Welcome to the first Gen X hotel.

Shu hairbrush, room key, black coffee. All my bases are covered.

My love of novelty drove me to the Ace Hotel in NYC. The Ace started in downtown Seattle, about a mile away from where I currently live. How would it translate to NYC?

Plus, the room came in at about a hundred bucks below what I’ve spent my last few visits to New York, when I stayed at the Library Hotel and its sister property, the Hotel Elysee.

I booked a teeny room at the Ace, but since I was staying by myself–and every room in NYC is teeny, in my experience–it seemed worth the gamble.

First impression: The lobby is too cool for school. (You can check out a photo on Wallpaper’s rave review.) I literally couldn’t find the front desk. I knew that the Ace had a gift shop, and based on all the stuff for sale around the area that had staff behind the counter, I assumed the actual check-in desk had to be somewhere else. Oops. A bellman rescued me, and let me know that the desk with all the display cases was the actual front desk.

When they assigned me a room on a low floor, I assumed I was getting the customary girl room: Women don’t complain, so give her the former closet. When I was researching hotels as a solo traveler for the Guidebook Company That Dare Not Speak Its Name, I would often get this treatment.

The front desk guy assured me it would be quiet. Um, OK.

Then I encountered this preachy sign by the elevator:

OMG, STFU and get me to my room already.

When I walked into the room, everything changed. I loved it immediately. It had a shared aesthetic that I love of old typewriters, World War II-era light fixtures, and wool blankets. In short, it reminded me of my grandfather, by way of a Brooklyn hipster. I started poking around the room.

After I settled in–and realized that, indeed, I wasn’t hearing thumping bass from the party in the lobby, I decided that I might actually like this hotel. I realized that the Ace aesthetic is just…chatty. Inanimate objects have opinions. I was charmed.

There was no view to speak of, and my room’s lone window opened into a sort of wide air shaft. I didn’t care, because I slept in relative quiet in a comfy bed.

Ultimately, Ace could have been an example of style over substance, which was the issue that I had with the Library Hotel. But because the hotel group rehabbed what was an existing old hotel (with good bones), the experience was a great one.

Not everything was perfect. I’m not a fan of hotels that are cheap about sample-size lotion, shampoo, etc. by putting it in a giant wall dispenser (and try to dress it up as being environmental), and I dislike “pet-friendly” hotels, because, let’s be honest, bad things happen to carpets when dogs are involved.

But these are minor quibbles. The hotel was very close to the subway lines I needed (as I previously determined by power-using Google Maps). It was walking distance from Penn Station, which was great. Just this morning, I read a piece in New York magazine christening this unnamed neighborhood “NoMad,” essentially because of the influence of the Ace and the proximity to the always-appealing Flatiron Building.

All of this is secondary, though, to the ultimate reason why I consider a hotel  a winner. The Ace gave me the single most important thing I require in a hotel: Quiet.

Notes about this entry: We never take money for anything we recommend. Ever. I paid for this hotel room. I also made my pics black-and-white, because it went with the hipster grandpa vibe.