The lobby absolutely lives up to the hype. It is still one of the best public rooms in New York, and the coffee and bar programming is genuinely good. What is oversold is the room experience. The rooms were revolutionary in 2009 and are now simply good, which is a different category of booking altogether.
The third-floor Loft rooms have private access to a quiet back staircase that leads directly to the lobby without passing through the main elevator bank. Regulars use it to move between the bar and the room without running into the crowd, and the staff will point you to it if you ask politely at check-in.
The Ace brief to Roman and Williams in 2009 was to build something that felt less like a hotel and more like a friend's brownstone apartment. The result set the template for every design hotel that followed: Mascioni sheets, Gibson guitars in the rooms, MusicHall turntables, SMEG refrigerators, and a lobby that treated guests as locals. Fifteen years later the lobby still pulls a daily crowd of Manhattan freelancers, which is both the compliment and the critique of the original design.
The Ace opened before anyone used the acronym NoMad for the stretch of Broadway above Madison Square Park. The hotel essentially forced the neighborhood into existence by bringing a Stumptown, a gastropub, and a rotating roster of retail tenants into a corridor that had been empty for years. Every independent shop, cafe, and restaurant that opened in the blocks around 29th and Broadway between 2009 and 2015 can draw a line back to the Ace lobby as the anchor tenant.
The original tenants were Stumptown and the Breslin, and the current lineup includes Bistro 29, a modern French restaurant, plus Libera for late-night cocktails and a new Sadelle's takeover of the rooftop space. The in-lobby bar is still where the photo-booth group shots happen at 1am, and the pre-theater crowd rolls in from 5pm. The rotation keeps the property feeling current even when the rooms are showing their age.
286 rooms in 1904 Hotel Breslin building since 2009. Roman and Williams design has aged. Medium-category rooms narrow plus Broadway-window-noisy; bathrooms 2009-vintage, slow wifi.
No published Instagram signal but Roman and Williams lobby created NoMad as design-hotel category. The audience is Roman-and-Williams-historical-document seekers and Ace-newsletter direct-bookers.
286 rooms span Medium (avoid for sleeping), Large King (mid-range), Loft (most-generous flagship with separate sitting area, salvaged-wood, Gibson guitar, SMEG fridge). Loft is the move.
At $$$ in NoMad, Ace competes with PUBLIC and Hoxton. Wins on 2009 Roman and Williams blueprint and Stumptown Coffee corner, not on freshly renovated rooms or Solomonov restaurants.
Ace Hotel New York opened in 2009 inside the old Hotel Breslin, a 1904 building on Broadway and 29th Street that had been rotting through decades of neglect, and within a year it had changed how New Yorkers used hotel lobbies. Roman and Williams, then still primarily known as the firm behind Gwyneth Paltrow's townhouse, built out the ground floor with reclaimed wood, 1970s sectionals, French bakery tables, and industrial lighting that encouraged anyone with a laptop to treat the space as a free office.
A Stumptown Coffee outpost at the corner delivered the caffeine, and the Breslin by April Bloomfield upstairs delivered a Michelin star and a lamb burger that defined the neighborhood for most of the early 2010s. The hotel basically created NoMad as a brand, and though the Breslin eventually closed and the rooftop reopened as Sadelle's, the 286 rooms still carry the Roman and Williams bones that made Ace the original in its category.
Late April–early May beats Met Gala. First two weeks of September beat UNGA. Anything Sep–Dec needs 60–90 days of lead time.
Signal stable — composite holding within ±2 points over 17 days (currently 62). No single dimension moved more than the rest.
File closes at VERY HIGH. Book direct four to six weeks out for September through December peaks and Frieze week. Skip if you sleep light; the lobby crowd runs late.