The Portrait
West 56th Street is a working Midtown block, and the Whitby answers it by turning inward: a drawing room and an orangery on the ground floor, a screening room with 130 seats, and a lift up to rooms that each have a floor-to-ceiling window onto the city.
It is a Firmdale house, which means the interiors are the reason people choose it — every room decorated differently, fabric everywhere, nothing beige. The screening room is a genuine facility rather than a gesture, and the orangery is where the hotel is at its best on a grey afternoon.
No published nightly figure. The hotel takes reservations through its own site; we list no phone number here because none is published directly on it.
Who it suits: two or three nights in Midtown for the theatre or the shops, for someone who wants the room to be a room rather than a corridor of identical doors.
Written by the Selloua editors from the address’s own published facts. Nothing in this entry was paid for.