Ypma's five favourite New York hotels

There's no sign above the door. In fact I don't remember there being a door, as such. When you cross the threshold of the Hotel on Rivington, you're not quite sure what it is you're getting into. Is this a hotel, a nightclub, or a condom full of hard-boiled eggs?

We're on New York's happening Lower East Side. Only ten minutes walk from Little Italy and Chinatown, another ten across to some serious shopping on Broadway and SoHo.

Like Whitechapel or Shoreditch in London, this was the area close to the docks where waves of immigrants colonised, worked and, once they started to prosper, moved on to somewhere more salubrious.

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Background

• Sinatra's New York

• Bargain hunting New York

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• New York's coolest hotels

• New York's hip hotels

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And like Whitechapel and Shoreditch, the neighbourhood is now being colonised from the other direction as young New Yorkers, attracted by the low-rise streets and relatively lower rents, move in and gentrify. Amid the sweatshops and weird underwear wholesalers are sprouting tea parlours, art galleries and blues bars.

Towering over these brick-built streets is the Hotel, 21 stylish glass stories – see-through glass most of it, with the odd pane of strategically placed opaque. It's easy to see why Herbert Ypma, photographer, design polymath and creator of the Hip Hotel brand, would select this as one of his chosen New York destinations.

In Ypma’s world, hip stands for Highly Individual Places, and this is quite a long way from your average Radisson.

The hotel lobby is the design child of Marcel Wanders, best-known for his egg vase. The vase was moulded from a condom filled with hard-boiled eggs and here it’s been blown up to a size you can walk through, a strangely Austin Powers experience.

Inside, the restaurant is all silver walls and black chandeliers, with a strange wooden outhouse in the middle which turns out to be the entrance to the toilets.

Unless your dining companion is unusually fascinating, you’ll find your eyes irresistibly drawn up to the glass atrium roof with its intriguing vista of people’s back windows and a bit of sky - until you get a crick in your neck and a lapful of linguine.

Where the hotel really scores is upstairs. Ypma explains that the concession to build a high-rise in this neighbourhood came almost by accident: "The planning permission application went in the day after 9/11.” All the rooms – and the bathrooms - have floor to ceiling glass and once you get above the level of the surrounding buildings the views are astonishing.

Day or night, you can see Manhattan stretching in all directions, from the bridges all the way to uptown. If you’re a rap star, or you want to blow everything you’ve got on a birthday party, you could take the penthouse suite, two floors of unobstructed 270-degree views and a stunning roof terrace, with fire pits and a hot-tub for 12.

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