The Margaret Louisa Home opened in 1891 for young women coming to New York to work. A hundred and thirty-five years later, the Romanesque Revival block on East Sixteenth Street takes guests again, under London management and a different sort of hush.
The lobby, The Twenty Two New York, 16 East 16th Street
The building sits half a block off Union Square, behind a façade of rough-cut stone and arched windows that Stanford White’s generation would still recognise. Margaret Louisa Vanderbilt Shepard put up the money. The YWCA ran it. Factory girls and stenographers paid by the week for a bed, a shared bath and the reassurance of a chaperone at the door.
The chaperone is gone. The velvet curtains are new. Nicole Vitagliano is in the ground-floor restaurant at ten in the morning, checking the coffee. It is the end of March, the week before Easter, and the light through the atrium looks like a painting that has been varnished too many times.
The house
Child Studio, the London practice behind the original Twenty Two on Grosvenor Square, spent five years on the Manhattan project. The interior designers Alexy Kos and Che Huang led the fit-out. They kept the ceilings high and the mouldings glossy. They laid herringbone carpet as a quiet nod to London. They painted doorways in colours that would have read as scandalous in 1891.
“We tried to respond to the building without pastiche,” Kos told Wallpaper* earlier this spring. That is visible in small, considered places: a brass door handle worn to suggest a century of hands, a cornice repaired rather than replaced, a stairwell mural that treats the new work as part of the old.
The chaperone is gone. The velvet curtains are new. The building still behaves like a place where something is being protected.
Isabelle RoweThe rooms
Seventy-eight keys, nineteen of them suites. The room I took was a Classic on the fourth floor, facing the back. Herringbone floor, four-poster, a bath with a roll-top tub sitting slightly off centre. It felt less like a hotel room than a set of private chambers that happened to have been cleaned that morning.
Classic guest room, The Twenty Two New York
The flagship is the Twenty Two Suite under the roof. Two bedrooms, a sitting room with a small bar, a pitched ceiling and a wallpaper of wind-swept trees that on a grey afternoon begins to feel like weather. The leopard-print carpet in the upper club salon, reportedly a pull from Madeleine Castaing’s Paris apartment, continues in here by the same confident hand.
The Twenty Two Suite, top floor
Café Zaffri
The Vitagliano sisters, Jennifer and Nicole, run the ground-floor restaurant with the chef Mary Attea and the pastry chef Camari Mick. The food is Mediterranean in the loose, practical sense: olive-oil braised artichokes, a roast fish that changes with the market, a pistachio-green semifreddo that arrives with a grove of candied rind on top. The dining room, designed by Post Company out of Brooklyn, has stained glass, embroidered wallcoverings and a mosaic floor that looks older than it is.
Café Zaffri, ground floor
Breakfast is the test for most hotel restaurants. Zaffri passes it. The eggs are loose, the bread arrives warm, and the waiter does not ask three times whether everything is in order.
The club
Three floors are private. Members pay three thousand dollars a year. The Living Room has a nineteenth-century stone fireplace and a pair of velvet banquettes that look purpose-built for long conversations. A small nightclub, hung with Fortuny lanterns and a mirrored disco ball, opens late on Thursdays and Fridays. There is a roof terrace and a members’ restaurant one staircase up from the bar.
The policy is unstated but clear. Guests of the hotel are welcome in the public spaces downstairs. The upper floors want to be asked.
The fashion week angle
Union Square is ten minutes by cab to the Shed, fifteen to the shows that still cling to Lower Manhattan, half an hour to Brooklyn on a night with traffic. It is an unshowy address for a city that has traded Park Avenue for the garment district for SoHo for the Meatpacking for Chelsea for the Financial District and back again. The building has been here the whole time.
The Living Room, private members’ club
The verdict
The Mark and The Carlyle know how to be The Mark and The Carlyle. The Twenty Two is doing something quieter. It has taken a building that was purpose-built to protect young women from the city and turned it into a building that protects everyone from the city, for a price. The club membership is a small part of what the place is doing. The house still behaves like a house.
Book a Classic on the back of the fourth floor. Eat breakfast downstairs. Walk to the square. Come back when the light is low.
The Splendid Edit visited The Twenty Two New York in March 2026. Classic rooms from approximately $825 per night. Suites from $1,600. Club membership by application. Book through thetwentytwo.com.
Photography courtesy of The Twenty Two New York — Café Zaffri image by Nicole Franzen — Originally reported by Wallpaper*