Can This NYC Hotel Make Small Rooms Cool?

While not European levels by any stretch, New York hotel rooms do run smaller than those of standard American hotels. Open up any review on TripAdvisor for one of the city’s mid-range, budget, or even some of the expensive properties and you’ll find a deluge of critiques boiling down to one thing—horror at the room size.

Now, a new hotel in the heart of one of the city’s most iconic neighborhoods—the Walker Tribeca—is making a bet on having visitors willingly choose small rooms (efficiently designed is the term). The hotel is in a transformed former button and ribbon factory and is the latest selection for our series on new hotels, The New Room with a View.

The trade-off, of course is the price (rooms start at $199) for staying in a hotel that from top to bottom has the feel of a luxury boutique. The lobby is designed almost out of a simulation for high-end millennial hangouts with both La Colombe and Blue Bottle locations inside a large airy space with couches and chairs spread throughout. All the gym’s equipment is wood and manufactured by the German company NOHrD. And the rooms themselves, the thinking goes, may be small but are designed to not just be tolerable but exactly what you need. And of course the location can’t be beat, backing up to Cortland Alley, and around the corner from spots like Le CouCou, Opening Ceremony, and the Glossier flagship.

We stayed at the hotel in February to see if they indeed pulled it off. A couple of the hotel’s elements rounding out that outside-the-room experience hadn’t been completed—the restaurant, roofdeck (with unobstructed views both up towards Midtown and then south down Broadway), and basement speakeasy were all still being worked on with plans to open this spring and summer.

As far as the rooms themselves, the biggest thing they have going for them are the huge windows which open up the bed to the whole city and flood the room in light. The beds are also very comfortable, and so spending a morning washed in sunlight reading in bed was a delight. Since the beds are tucked into the corner, the room doesn’t feel cluttered or like you might trip on something in the middle of the night. The sole criticism would be that for the sake of efficiency the hotel opted for a sliding barn door on the bathroom, which in an intimate room can make thinks a bit awkward. (This design choice is inexplicably popular in new hotels.)

When visiting cities, we aren’t often looking to be wowed with the biggest room you’ve ever seen or unimaginable luxury—we’re out exploring all day and night! The most important things are comfort and location, and on those counts the Walker totally delivers.