To get straight to the point, the room was delectable. My favorite hotels are ones where you can open the door and slip into a different life. And the life on offer at The NoMad? I felt like I had walked into a fin de siecle Parisian pied-a-terre with contemporary plumbing and a hint of time travel.
A guest room at the NoMad
White walls, black moldings, sash windows swathed in white curtains that kissed the floor – yes, yes, yes. But what pumped the pulse was the claw-footed bathtub parked nonchalantly next to the polished mahogany writing desk. Proust would have felt at home here once he figured out how to work the TV and iHome docking station.
A porter in a Thom Brown-inspired suit, his long hair pulled into a curly topknot, had accompanied me to the room. Though able and willing to carry an overnight bag, I was glad he was there. The room was oddly confusing.
In the entry, painted black and no bigger than a gasp, a stack of leather trunks hid the minibar and safe. The stall shower stood demurely behind a heavy blue brocade screen planted opposite the king-size bed. On the wall next to the shower a mirror in a gilded frame hung above the washstand.
But where was the toilet? For a heartbeat I wondered if it was down the hall. (At $325 for anAtelier room, I wasn’t expecting The Pod.) But no. My guide turned a brass knob to open the screen’s cleverly camouflaged door and – voila — a pint-size water closet appeared, with black walls, a dual-flush Geberit toilet and a fetching little sink in the corner.
Long before it opened in late March, the NoMad Hotel beamed out across the radar. There’s the pedigree. The hotel is the first born of the Sydel Group headed by Andrew Zobler, a former partner at Andre Balazs Properties and head of acquisitions for the Starwood Group.
Commandeering the restaurant are chef Daniel Humm and restaurateur Will Guidara, the team behind Eleven Madison Park.
But the hotel’s appearance, embracing classic decorative flourishes rarely seen in contemporary New York boutique hotels like opulent textiles, oriental rugs and polished mahogany furniture is what makes the NoMad feel original.
Taking their cues from the boisterous elegance of the century-old building’s Beaux Arts exterior, the developers tapped Jacques Garcia, a French architect and interior designer known for conjuring atmospheric Parisian properties like the Hotel Odeon Saint Germain, and turned him loose on the former office building. The result: a new interior that looks old, or at least old the way 21st-century guests might imagine it. (Anyone who has visited Paris’s Carnavalet Museum knows Proust didn’t sleep in a king-size bed.)
My room, not surprisingly, proved ideal for holing up. The Frette bathrobe was thick and comfy. The pillow-top bed, dressed in crisp Sferra sheets and backed by a handsome brown leather headboard, was the full Goldilocks – not too soft, not too hard. And the reclaimed maple floor, polished to a high-beam gloss? Gorgeous, like the pale Herit rug that warmed it.
Amusing details appeared almost everywhere I gazed — the painted metal waste-basket, a stylish take on an Edwardian coal bin; the square bedside tables enveloped in black velvet; the shallow polished mahogany bookcase that supported the flatpanel LG TV.
The TV, unfortunately, wasn’t so amusing. I could only get a handful of the channels and nothing of the promised premium. A call to the front desk brought an engineer to my door within ten minutes. He fiddled with the set, said he’d adjust it from a master control, then paid a second visit, all in vain. Long story short: the front desk offered to move me to another room the next day (too bad, I was only there for one night).
So in my Proustian Parisian flat I did low-tech Proustian things. I took a bubble bath gazing out the window (and up at the Empire State Building, its topknot lighted green). I read into the wee hours, curled up in a distressed leather chair straight out of a London supper club. I slept like a log.
And the next morning I ate a big breakfast – an excellent, if pricey, Crab Benedict ($22) with good, strong coffee. In the dining room, another glamorous fabric-swathed lair with chairs upholstered in gold silk brocade, a steel gray sky beamed through the skylight. That channeled Paris, too.
The NoMad Hotel, 1170 Broadway at 28th Street, New York, NY 10001; 212 212 796 1500. Rooms start at $295 (and quickly escalate in price).
When hotel historians – hey, they’re out there somewhere — look back on 2012, they’ll say what we already know: it was, for the most part, a very good year. New York City boasts 91,500 hotel rooms – up from 90,000 in 2011. Put another way, 29 million hotel room nights were sold in New York City in 2012. 
October isn’t normally thought of as the start of a new year – unless you’re publishing a restaurant guide. This month biggies Michelin and Zagat unveiled their 2013 guides to New York City restaurants. As always, we snapped up copies (yes, we still like paper guides).