W New York – Union Square by Rockwell Group
W New York – Union Square marks a vivid new chapter for this hotel in New York, United States, guided by Rockwell Group’s return to a familiar address. The studio recasts the Beaux-Arts landmark with rooms, lounges, and a restaurant tuned to Union Square’s changing rhythm, from market mornings to late-night gatherings. Color, pattern, and art shape a layered interior that feels both rooted in the city and pointed toward the brand’s future.
Guests step from Union Square’s rush into a lobby charged with pattern and polish. Light slides across veined marble and metal, catching fabric and art in quick flashes. A bold mural, houndstooth upholstery, and the sweep of a sculptural stair set the tone in seconds.
Within this historic hotel, Rockwell Group reshapes a Beaux-Arts shell into a contemporary hospitality project that leans hard on color and material. The hotel in New York, United States, takes Union Square’s park, markets, and rooftops as its palette, turning seasonal shifts into interiors that move from autumnal warmth to spring freshness. Every major room reads as a social stage, from the double-height Living Room to the ombré-wrapped E-Wow suites.
Arriving Through Contrast
The approach from the sidewalk lands guests in an arrival area that filters city energy rather than shutting it out. Black and white houndstooth on a long banquette plays against veined marble floors, a crisp graphic under current of movement. Shantell Martin’s commissioned mural, with its empowerment-focused imagery, pulls the eye upward and sideways, turning the entry into a quick-read gallery. That composition leads naturally toward the stair, where metal edges and a fluid rug promise a more theatrical ascent.
Climbing The Painted Stair
The main stair coils upward in a loose, asymmetrical curve, its polished metal contours catching light like a moving edge. Over each tread, a bespoke rug, inspired by Faig Ahmed’s “Doubts,” looks as if paint were poured and frozen mid-swell. Colors drawn from across the hotel fuse here, pooling at the check-in level in a denser field of pattern that anchors the second floor. That visual current nudges guests toward the heart of the public rooms without a sign in sight.
Living Room As Social Core
Once a ballroom, the double-height Living Room now works as both lounge and social theater. Blue and orange tones bring a charged warmth to the preserved marble columns and ornate ceiling, letting history sit beside contemporary color. A resin bar embedded with botanicals glows at the edge of the room, its translucent depth adding a subtle Art Deco note under the high ceiling. Behind it, a dramatic two-story back bar stacks bottles and light, turning everyday service into part of the visual composition.
Next door, the Living Room Café shifts the mood with a monochromatic range of greens. That palette pulls the park indoors, giving daytime workers and coffee drinkers a quiet echo of Union Square’s foliage. Devoción coffee by day and cocktails by night keep the room in near-constant, low-key use, so the interior reads differently from morning laptops to late-evening conversations. Furniture and color together carve out casual work zones without breaking the visual flow from the larger Living Room.
Dining With Maritime Warmth
Seahorse, on the ground floor, leans into the building’s urban setting while nodding to New York’s maritime history. A central seafood bar structures the room, giving diners an immediate focal point and a sense of movement around shucked shells and plated dishes. Zinc on the bar top, warm wood wall panelling, and mother-of-pearl accents form a tight, tactile material range that catches low light. A mural by Brooklyn collective En Viu threads that maritime story across the walls, tying the brasserie’s identity to the city’s working harbor past.
Guestrooms In Seasonal Color
Upstairs, guestrooms and suites translate the Union Square narrative into calmer, more private rooms. The palette shifts from autumnal tones to springlike freshness, expressed through botanical carpets and ombré wall coverings that move softly from one shade to another. Lacquered finishes catch window light in small flashes, giving compact surfaces more presence without crowding the room. Work and leisure sit in distinct zones, held together by a bold checkerboard minibar that provides visual weight and a memorable, almost graphic pause.
In the E-Wow suites, color deepens into a full gradient experience. Drapery and walls move from gold to green, so daylight registers differently as it falls across corners and seating. That gradation, paired with custom artwork from local artists, amplifies the hotel’s connection to New York’s cultural energy. Even at this scale, the rooms keep to the project’s core idea: interiors tuned to mood, time of day, and the park just outside.
Across lobby, lounges, restaurant, and rooms, Rockwell Group treats each interior as a distinct chapter tied by color, art, and material rhythm. Historic architectural bones stay legible while new surfaces, rugs, and bars bring a contemporary pulse. As night falls over Union Square Park, the hotel’s interiors answer with their own layered glow, ready for the next wave of guests to move through them.
Photography by Michael Kleinberg
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