Over the past decade, a gilded collection of elite hotels near Central Park have vied for the distinction of being the most expensive in New York. Several, including the St. Regis, Carlyle and the Plaza, opened more than 80 years ago. Most, including the Baccarat, a relative newcomer, greet guests with sparkly chandeliers.
This month, a new, relatively understated, crystal-chandelier-rejecting player arrived to challenge them: the Aman New York, in the Crown Building across from Trump Tower. At US$3200 ($5000) a night — and often far more — for the cheapest available room, the cost of entry is nearly triple that of the rest.
For that price, guests get at least 69sq m of space in muted colours, with gas fireplaces, retractable flat-screen TVs and Instagram-worthy bathrooms larger than many New York bedrooms. Oak floors and glowing Japanese-inspired screens complete the look. If they have the funds, guests can take it up a notch and spend US$36,000 a night to reserve two adjoining suites and a half day in a private spa featuring its own hammam and plunge pool.
All Aman guests get access to a jazz club, an expansive greenery-filled terrace, an indoor pool, a sauna and a cryotherapy chamber where they can drown out the heat and chaos of midtown before returning to their rooms. There, noise levels hover on podcast-studio levels of quiet, according to a staff member, who admitted that most podcasters cannot afford to stay at the hotel.
All of this is part of the billionaire CEO’s attempt to prove that the Aman brand’s version of serenity and exclusivity, originally forged in remote locations in Asia, can also succeed in midtown Manhattan. Other urban outposts in the US, including in Miami Beach, Florida, and Beverly Hills, California, are slated to open, as well.
“Since purchasing the brand in 2014, my strategy has been to bring the Aman experience to urban destinations, as well as continuing to grow our remote locations,” Vladislav Doronin, 59, the owner and CEO, wrote in an email, adding that he aims to take the “Aman resort experience from the horizontal to the vertical.”
His strategy also includes creating a members-only Aman Club within new hotels that costs US$200,000 per location to join, and expanding the Aman product line (a new addition: Aman New York fragrance).
Already, Doronin, a Soviet Union-born Swedish citizen who made a fortune developing real estate in Russia before he bought Aman Resorts in 2014, seems to have proved that he can generate intrigue. Before the hotel opened, even some “founders,” as members are called, said they struggled to secure reservations at the New York property. Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, was spotted at opening festivities.
Many of the Aman’s 22 residences atop the hotel’s 83 guest rooms were priced high even for Billionaire’s Row, as the surrounding neighbourhood is called. And yet they seem to be selling. If the five-story penthouse residence closes for US$180 million, the price real estate news sites reported that it went into contract for, it would be the third most expensive home ever sold in the US, according to Jonathan Miller, a New York-based real estate appraiser.
Aman’s approach to service, design and privacy has created a cadre of self-described “Aman junkies” — celebrities, uber-rich people and other travellers intent on visiting each of the Aman resorts scattered in 20 countries.
“Once you go to one, you become addicted to this feeling that the hotel can achieve in you,” said a frequent guest who didn’t want to be named because she and her husband don’t want people to know how much money they make.
Aman’s goal, according to the chief operating officer, is to add at least a dozen resorts to the existing portfolio of 34 within a few years. But with its urban expansion, its hierarchical clubs and sheer number of properties, will the magic wear thin?
Discretion, Peace and Unicorns
Aman Resorts emerged by chance. In the late 1980s, Indonesian publisher and hotelier Adrian Zecha — a man so charismatic that he was among the first people to convince Rupert Murdoch to invest in Asia — was walking along the beach in Phuket, Thailand, and fell in love with a coconut plantation. Plans to build a holiday home morphed into a vision of a boutique hotel, which he constructed with Ed Tuttle, an American architect. Tuttle had never created a hotel, but he understood luxury; his previous projects included designing a holiday palace for the Shah of Iran before he was overthrown.
Amanpuri, which means “place of peace” in Sanskrit, according to the resort, opened in Phuket in 1988. Over the coming decades, Zecha created Amans throughout the world, typically working with Tuttle or two other architects: Jean-Michel Gathy and Kerry Hill. The focus was on building luxurious, typically minimalist, resorts that flowed seamlessly into the spectacular surrounding landscapes.
Billionaires and celebrities, including Bill Gates and Prince, flocked to the resorts, partly because discretion was a core part of the brand. Service was also reliably exceptional. Each guest would get one or two staff members assigned entirely to them, said Miguel Guedes De Sousa, the general manager of the Amanjena in Morocco and the Amanpulo in the Philippines from 2003 to 2013. “During their stay, they’d have no days off and work as many hours as possible so that they could be totally focused on that client,” he said.
The extreme pampering persists to this day. Lauren Trenkle, 37, of Manhattan Beach, California, and her husband have been celebrating their now 6-year-old daughter’s birthday at the Amangiri in Utah since she turned 3. During that first visit, the staff learned that the toddler liked unicorns, so they dressed up a horse as a unicorn. When the family returned to their room, they found a framed photo of the girl’s mythical encounter.
“She thinks it’s the only place we get to see unicorns,” Trenkle said of the annual tradition.
By 2013, Zecha no longer owned the company. When an Indian real estate company decided to sell it, Omar Amanat, an American movie producer and entrepreneur, approached him about trying to buy it back. They teamed up with Doronin, who had been staying at Aman properties since the ‘90s.
Guedes De Sousa remembers organising a birthday dinner in a romantically lit tent for Doronin and his then partner, Naomi Campbell, in Marrakech, back when they were just another Aman power couple. Compared to King Salman of Saudi Arabia, who sometimes bought out the Marrakech hotel, or the man who requested 20,000 candles and fresh lobsters in the middle of the desert, they were low-key, he said.
Doronin saw a missed opportunity to expand Aman to cities, where, he wrote in an email, it was difficult to find Aman-caliber “tranquillity and peace.” So, in 2014 he, Amanat and Zecha acquired Aman Resorts for US$358 million.
The partnership did not go smoothly, and a series of lawsuits over control of the company ensued. In 2016 a court in London issued an order stating that Doronin had settled with Amanat’s company and that Doronin was in charge. Neither Amanat nor Zecha is currently involved in Aman. (Efforts to contact Amanat and Zecha through their lawyers and media teams were unsuccessful.)
In 2015, Doronin took another gamble. He and Shvo, a luxury real estate developer, purchased the 20 upper floors of the Crown Building on the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 57th Street.
New York, it was hoped, would prove that Aman could thrive in US cities. Seven years later, the Aman New York is finally putting that idea to the test.
In the months before the opening, however, Doronin drew unwelcome scrutiny, first in New York, where protesters gathered in March near the then-unopened hotel and demanded to know his stance on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and then for a land deal in Aspen, Colorado. Doronin sued the publishers of the two news outlets — the Real Deal, in New York, and The Aspen Times — for misrepresenting Doronin’s ties to Russia. The Aspen Times settled with him and he dropped his suit against the Real Deal, court documents show. He has denied that he has done business in Russia in recent years and denounced Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine.
Location, Location, Location
Much of the legendary Aman allure has to do with its locations. The Amangiri is set in a serene Mars-like swath of desert in Utah. Amanwana is on a small Indonesian island, amid a nature and marine reserve. Aman Sveti Stefan is set on the former summer residence of a queen in Montenegro.
But while guests at other locations gaze at tea fields, ancient temples, verdant valleys and lapping waves, guests at Aman New York gaze at Trump Tower, luxury stores and honking taxis.
On what was supposed to be opening night in early August, I tried — and failed — to gain access to the hotel. Peering through the doors, I spotted a beige couch wrapped in plastic. Yes, it was supposed to open this week, a door attendant told me, but it had been pushed back until the following week.
Since I was there, I decided to explore the neighbourhood. I walked past the Bulgari store on the ground floor of the Crown Building, past the police car in front of Trump Tower. Eventually, I arrived at the Peninsula Hotel, one of the 10 or so luxury hotels in the area. At the bar, a man who described himself as “someone who invests in things” explained that the reason the hotel could charge $28 for a cocktail is that because, after 9/11, many in the finance industry moved here from the Wall Street area.
This is part of the reason there is space for the Aman hotel and club, several luxury travel agents explained to me. International travellers want to be near Central Park, high-end shopping and the Museum of Modern Art — and bankers and traders want somewhere to drink.
“It’s the internet bubble of luxury travel right now,” said Juan Fernandez, the owner of Elli Travel Group, an agency based in New York, who has found that as his clients emerge from their “Covid hangover,” they are not only willing, but also excited to spend more than they’ve ever spent before.
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Transforming the Crown Building into something that had the potential to become such a hot spot was a major undertaking, despite the fact that, in Doronin’s view, the building was “one of the finest examples of beaux-arts architecture in the city.”
He reached out to Gathy, the only living architect from the original Aman trio of designers. Gathy’s career took off when, in 1987, the architect, then in his early 30s, designed a project in the Maldives that prompted an introduction to Zecha. Over the coming decades, he’d design Amanwana in Indonesia, and Aman Venice, where George and Amal Alamuddin Clooney spent their wedding night beneath a 300-year-old fresco. Gathy is currently working on seven more Amans, including two in Saudi Arabia.
I met Gathy in a lounge at the Park Hyatt, a couple of blocks from the Aman, which, four days past its scheduled opening date, was still not ready. Gathy, a Belgian architect who lives in Malaysia, said he began the New York project by taking the elevator to the top and then walking down, floor by floor, examining the geometry of the windows, the ceiling heights and the overall “flow of the building.”
It did not take him long to decide how he’d organise the hotel, which would include a “public area” where the hotel would come alive on the 14th floor, the location of the largest terrace — a sprawling tree-and-shrubbery-filled area with spaces to lounge, dine and seal deals.
“I don’t want them to say, ‘Oh, it’s beautifully designed,’ " Gathy said. “I want to make sure that people enjoy the terrace and come back. If they do that, my project is successful.”
Every Aman must have a “sense of place,” he added. Identifying New York’s characteristic feature was easy, he said: “What makes New York New York City is energy.”
That energy plays into every design decision, he said. For example, he chose chairs for the restaurant with straight backs to help top bankers efficiently sign big deals, he said, adjusting his posture.
He worked closely with lighting designer Enrique Peiniger, who created lighting scenarios that encourage discretion in Arva, the hotel’s Italian restaurant, which may eventually take reservations from nonguests. To limit how far a diner can see, he illuminated tables with narrow beams of light. “When you sit at the table you can see the person in front of them, but not four or five tables away,” he said.
The Tour
More than a week after what was supposed to have been the official opening, I finally got a chance to see the hotel. The regal Art Deco-inspired door was still obscured by scaffolding. This meant that the first opportunity to experience the Amanness of it all came within the foyer, which featured a gas fireplace embedded in dark marble and a simple beige couch.
The area around the check-in counter was more impressive. Rather than a chandelier, the star of the show was a massive burnt-orange piece of art made from recycled cardboard. In the nearby elevator, a screen played a looping video of Aman resorts all over the world, which left me feeling like I was on my way to see a travel agent. But once I exited on the 14th floor, it was clear that I was not. Past a dramatically high-ceilinged seating area with yet another gas fireplace, I arrived at the massive terrace, with its bonsai trees and fountains exuding calm.
Even the standard guest room was larger than many competitors’ suites. Perhaps the most impressive features are the bathrooms, with their alluring white tubs, modern vanities and screens, dotted with gentle light. In one of the suites — which go for around US$20,000 a night — the bathroom was larger than some two-bedroom apartments in New York.
Before the opening, there had been some drama about the pool, with some wealthy guests telling the newsletter Air Mail that it struck them as “municipal.” But it felt to me like a warm, tropically humid Art Deco-esque space where one might sip cognac.
Gathy had described a vision of bankers doing deals in this place. On the way out, I approached two men in suits — one maybe 55, the other half his age. They were chatting with such buoyant intensity that it occurred to me that Gathy’s vision might have already become reality.
What did they think of the hotel?
“Off the record, it’s fantastic,” said the older man.
When I asked for his name, he gave me a smile-smirk that seemed to imply that I should know who he was.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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