Royalton Hotel (New York City, New York)

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136-foot, 13-story Beaux Arts hotel completed in 1898. Designed by Rossiter & Wright as an exclusive residential hotel, its design was unusual because it was one of the first buildings to enable street-level passage from one block to the next. As originally designed, tenants had apartments overlooking 43rd or 44th Street, while servants lived in rooms overlooking the airshafts along the sides of the building.

It was reopened as the Royalton Hotel on October 10, 1988, it was the first hotel re-designed by Philippe Starck. During the summer of 2007, the Morgans Hotel Group decided to renovate the hotel to update the interior, this time by architects Roman & Williams. The hotel reopened on October 1, 2007, with 170 guest rooms.

Both near-matching facades are tripartite in design, with 2-story stone bases, buff-colored brick shafts, and 3-story limestone crowns. The south facade's base is rusticated limestone, while the north is faced in grey granite, with 2-story central entry porticoes featuring fluted Ionic columns flanking the short sets of steps. To the outside of the Ionic columns, squared piers support an entablature with "ROYALTON" below a dentiled cornice, between two pairs of small cartouches. A broken scrolled pediment surmounts the cornice with a central medallion flanked by acanthus leaves, and a crowning urn. There are windows on both floors to the sides of the entry porticos, taller on the ground floor; the ground floor's western bay on the south facade has a metal service door in place of the window.

The brick mid-section has a deeply recessed middle bay with three single-windows, and end bays with paired windows. All of the windows have projecting stone sills and splayed lintels. The inward-facing sidewalls created by the recessed middle bay have narrow single-windows, also with stone sills and splayed lintels. At the 9th floor the piers framing the end bays have elaborately carved stone projections supporting a stone cornice across the top of the floor. At the recessed bay, two long and intricately carved brackets support the middle of the cornice, with three rosettes on its underside.

The 3-story crown is faced in limestone, with a 2-story loggia in the middle bay; a pair of Corinthian columns separate the three openings, and paneled piers frame the loggia, with round-arched tops to the openings at the 11th floor. Wrought-iron railings front the openings at the 11th floor; the doors opening onto the balcony are deeply recessed behind the loggia. The end bays have round-arched windows on the 11th floor, with carved stone spandrels between the 10th & 11th floors. A cornice, with dentils in the projecting middle section, caps the 11th floor. The 12th floor has square-headed windows in each bay, with the openings separated by elaborately ornamented panels on the piers. Triglyphs line the lower roof line. The top floor is set back, creating a small terrace at the front of each facade.

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