The Crosby Street Hotel at 79 Crosby Street is the New York outpost of Firmdale Hotels, Kit Kemp's London-headquartered collection of individually designed boutique properties, and represents her design practice at full ambition: every one of the 86 rooms is different, with commissioned artworks, hand-painted fabrics, custom upholstery, and the colour confidence that characterises Kemp's approach to the hotel room as a curated domestic environment rather than a standardised commercial space.
The rooms occupy an 11-floor building with floor-to-ceiling windows looking over the SoHo cobblestone streets and, from the upper floors, views of Lower Manhattan's skyline. The private sculpture garden, an outdoor space at the building's lower level, planted and maintained with the institutional investment of a property that takes its outdoor spaces seriously, is SoHo's most unexpected hotel amenity: a garden, in a neighbourhood that has no gardens, accessible exclusively to hotel guests.
The Crosby Bar and Restaurant handles the hotel's food and beverage with the Firmdale standard: genuinely good European cooking, a dining room that functions as a neighbourhood gathering place, and the breakfast that the hotel's guest profile specifically requires at the quality level it expects. The Drawing Room and private cinema provide the additional social spaces that the Firmdale model employs to turn a boutique hotel into a residents' club.
The cobblestone Crosby Street location, between Prince and Spring Streets in the heart of SoHo, places the hotel within the neighbourhood's gallery and retail concentration while maintaining the residential-street remove that the boutique format requires. The proximity to the Mercer Hotel at the Prince Street corner creates a luxury hotel cluster at SoHo's centre that the neighbourhood's character supports and the city's visitor population reliably seeks out.
The Crosby Street anniversary proposition is the combination of Kit Kemp's individually designed rooms, the pleasure of discovering the specific choices made for the particular room you occupy, and the SoHo gallery context that makes the surrounding neighbourhood an anniversary activity in itself. The Crosby Bar's dinner table, the sculpture garden's afternoon privacy, and the hotel's drawing room's evening fire create an anniversary stay with the specific texture of a hotel that has been designed by a person rather than a brand committee.
A Crosby Street honeymoon operates on the discovery model: the room Kit Kemp designed for you, the gallery you find on the cobblestone streets on the walk to breakfast, the specific combination of colour and craft that makes the hotel's public spaces worth exploring beyond the room. For couples whose honeymoon sensibility is design-led rather than spectacle-driven, the Crosby Street provides the New York version of what the Mercer and the Ace Hotel era made possible in downtown Manhattan.
From $1,110/night; suites from $2,000/night. Check availability at firmdalehotels.com/hotels/crosby-street-hotel.
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Editorial · #16 on the Top 20 New York Hotels 2026 list
Crosby Street Hotel ranks here as the strongest SoHo design hotel and as Firmdale Hotels' New York flagship. Kit Kemp's individually-designed rooms, 86 across 11 floors, no two with the same color palette or fabric, represent the most sustained design point of view of any Manhattan hotel. The property opened in 2009 on Crosby Street between Prince and Spring, the SoHo block where the neighborhood's gallery and design infrastructure cluster, and has held Forbes Five-Star recognition since 2014.
For New York visitors, Crosby Street is the address for design-conscious guests who want SoHo as the principal base. The Crosby Bar, the all-day lobby restaurant and cocktail program, draws non-residents as well as guests, giving the hotel a working pulse. The Crosby Screening Room is one of the better hotel amenities in New York, available for private guest screenings. The Loft Suite at the top of the building with its private terrace looking up Crosby Street is the property's signature accommodation.