D
ream Downtown is the kind of hotel you might usually expect to find in Miami or Las Vegas. A hole punched through the core of the building accommodates a beach club and heated pool, the glass bottom of which also forms a translucent ceiling to the lobby lounge below. Nine of the hotel’s 316 guestrooms have direct access to the pool, where cabana boys are armed with cool towels and Evian mist. The PH-D rooftop lounge on the top floor houses a nightlub, all state-of-the-art lighting and Italian marble. Billed as a “fashion-forward lifestyle hotel” Dream Downtown is very much a party place, and in the past, its owner Vikram Chatwal, has had something of a reputation as a party person. The son of Hampshire Hotels founder Sant Singh Chatwal, he juggled careers as a hotelier, male model and sometime actor in the late Nineties. A
regular fixture on ‘Most Eligible Batchelor’ lists, Chatwal had a cameo in Zoolander, and was as likely to feature on Page Six of the New York Post as he was in Vogue. That was before he married Indian model Priya Sachdev, and set about building his hotel group internationally. Midtown Manhattan properties – Night, The Time, Stay and the original Dream hotel, were joined by sister Dream outposts in Bangkok and Cochin. Back in Manhattan, his eponymous hotel company opened Dream Downtown in summer 2011. Located between two of the most vibrant neighbourhoods in New York, Chelsea and the Meat Packing District, the hotel is the result of multi-million dollar renovation of an iconic Albert Ledner building by Handel Architects. A throughblock site, fronting both 16th and 17th Streets, adjacent to the Maritime Hotel, accommodates 316 guestrooms,
OPPOSITE PAGE: Handel Architects have clad the sloped façade of Albert Ledner’s 1966 National Maritime Annexe with stainless steel tiles, adding new porthole windows to loosen the rigid grid of his original design ABOVE: The bar area within the Marble Lane steakhouse
WWW.SLEEPERMAGAZINE.COM
MARCH / APRIL 2012
067