As far as cups of tea are concerned, it is hardly a bargain. A pot of Earl Grey in the morning at the Plaza hotel’s marble-clad Palm Court restaurant will set you back $12 (£5.96) – and that doesn’t include any chocolate digestives.
The century-old New York landmark on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Central Park South reopened its doors this month after a three-year renovation costing more than $400m. Split into luxurious private residences and a five-star $1,000-a-night hotel, it is staggeringly decadent.
In each hotel room, there’s a fur coverlet on the bed. The toilet roll holders are plated with 24-carat gold. There’s a butler on every floor and the room service menu includes Iranian osetra caviar, costing $225 an ounce, and bottles of Louis XIII cognac at $4,100.
Run by the Canadian chain Fairmont, the hotel has a “royal” suite with two adjoining miniature suites for bodyguards, featuring pressure sensors on the bathroom floor to turn on the lights after dark. That can be yours for $20,000 a night.
“I see us having the CEOs, chairmen, the board members of all the top companies throughout the US and Asia coming to stay with us,” says Shane Krige, general manager of the hotel. “Our key clients are going to be high-end leisure travellers or business travellers looking for something unique.”
The Plaza occupies a special place in American cultural history. It was the venue for Truman Capote’s black and white ball. Scott Fitzgerald set important scenes here in his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby.
The Beatles stayed at the hotel on their first New York visit in 1964. More recently, Macaulay Culkin evaded robbers at the Plaza in Home Alone 2 and Catherine Zeta-Jones’s wedding to Michael Douglas was “ruined” by errant gossip magazine photographers in 2000.
But by the early part of this decade, the Plaza’s former glory was fading and the hotel was losing money after a rapid turnover of owners. The Israeli firm Elad Properties bought it for $675m in 2004 from Millennium and Copthorne with a promise to bring it back to life.
Initially, Elad floated a proposal to turn the entire property into private residences. After vigorous protests from heritage enthusiasts and hospitality unions, Elad compromised with a plan to split the 875-room property into 178 residences, 130 hotel rooms and 181 hybrids known as “hotel condominiums”.
For architect Gal Nauer, the project threw up unique challenges – including unpicking one-time owner Donald Trump’s penchant for bling.
Gesturing at wall and ceiling decorations in the Palm Court, Nauer says: “There were layers and layers of gold paint on here – you couldn’t see the original details. When we cleaned it off, it revealed so many things.”
When asked about a rustic, ornate tapestry over a bank of elevators, she says: “We all thought it must be so special – it looks very old. But when we looked into it, we realised it was Trump. It’s from the 1980s.”
The residential side of the Plaza looks out onto the horse-and-carriage drive at the front of Central Park familiar to millions of tourists. One billionaire property developer, Harry Macklowe, likes it so much that he has bought an entire floor, knocking nine apartments into one for a price of more than $60m – a record for New York – to serve as a private residence just for him and his wife.
So far, only a few owners have moved in. On a Monday afternoon, the foyer to the Plaza residences was quiet except for an elderly couple leaving their apartment. The woman wore Dolce & Gabbana wraparound sunglasses and leant on a gold cane, while her husband carried a patent leather attache case.
“The Plaza is in the memories, in the hearts, of New Yorkers for different events,” says Nauer. “For birthdays, anniversaries, sweet 16s. We wanted to bring it back to what it used to be.”
Nauer’s changes include polishing and revealing floor mosaics previously covered by carpets. Above the Palm Court restaurant, she has recreated a long-destroyed multicoloured stained-glass roof. Because natural light is obscured by upper floors, Elad has installed a light box over the roof that varies in tone to simulate dawn, daytime, twilight and evening.
A new retail area, with a koi pool as centrepiece, features shops including the clothes brand Prada, the bejewelled mobile phones specialist Vertu and sunglasses brand Morgenthal Frederics.
The place may be out of reach for most of us – but experts say the Plaza serves a potentially lucrative niche. Warren Marr, director of hospitality consulting at PricewaterhouseCoopers, says: “You have a lot of international business coming into Manhattan and the currency exchange rate is very favourable to these people. If the product and service is up to standard, this kind of level is sustainable.”
He points out that in 2007, hotel rates in the centre of New York rose by an average of 12.9% and occupancy levels were at their highest since the turn of the century. In property deals, upscale hotels change hands for prices in excess of $1m a room.
“The Plaza is an iconic name, an incredible property with very high single brand recognition,” says Marr. “In Manhattan, it’s all about supply and demand and there are times during the year when the market is getting room rates which are very, very high.”
Elad wants to capitalise on the name by creating up to 13 Plaza hotels around the world – including at sites already earmarked in Las Vegas and Singapore. Efforts are under way to find a suitable property in London, after an initial attempt to purchase a building fell through.
In New York, the Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal will be among the first residents of the “royal suite” when he arrives for the formal gala launch of the hotel in May.
Until then, the building is still eerily quiet, with just a trickle of private residents slowly moving in. This near emptiness has some unfortunate consequences. One new resident, Joanna Cutler, popped out of her apartment to dispose of some rubbish, but the garbage room’s door jammed shut on an improperly installed carpet board. She was stuck for seven hours. Nobody heard her screams and she cut her fingers “to shreds” trying to get out.
“I can live through anything if I know there’s an end in sight, but I was beginning to think there wasn’t,” she told the New York Post.
Worse still, she had left the door to her Plaza flat open. Anybody, she pointed out, could have walked in and stolen her Fabergé egg.
