The World’s Most Eccentric Hotelier Brings Fun Back to New York

“This is not your typical lobby,” Alan Faena tells me as we walk through the front doors of his highly anticipated Manhattan hotel. Inside, muralist Diego Gravinese is at work putting the finishing touches on a 105-foot-wide, 28-foot-tall installation that includes a mythical Colossal Woman pulling an unknown treasure out of an ocean vortex and a constellation of symbols hovering over clusters of quartz. A spiral staircase enrobed in gold leaf glows on one side. “It’s a cathedral,” Faena declares, replacing the apparent L-word with an embellished term he’s used at all his hotels. The Colossal Woman, he says, is creating the world.

It would be easy to assume that a man whose last name is presented in towering gold letters over the entrance of a Bjarke Ingels Group-designed structure would build hospitality cathedrals to worship his perceived genius. But Faena is soft-spoken and self-effacing, even if his eccentric design ethos is very much the opposite. As such, his goal for the cathedral—and indeed many of his hotels’ nooks and crannies—is to give a hallowed space to all strata of New York City’s broader community.