It's a favorite celebrity playground, competing perhaps only with the Soho and Tribeca Grands to draw in a fashionable Hollywood-esque clientele, along with their paparazzi.
EXPERIENCE
The Mercer hotel is New York's first loft hotel and captures the very essence of the area. Lofts are a uniquely SoHo phenomenon, pioneered by artists in the 1960s who took over the neighborhood's many abandoned warehouses. Loft living is about sunlight and leaving the original architecture intact, and at the Mercer, brickwork is exposed, windows are industry size, and iron support columns run from floor to ceiling.
It is one of the few hotels to boast wooden floors, and Christian Liagre's spare furnishings are appropriately unobtrusive, because, as your downtown designer friend might say, the beauty of a place is in its empty spaces.
The rooms have a nice secular touch, while bathrooms feature stark white tiles, deliciously soft Frette towels and hip Face Stockholm beauty products. Ask for a room where the Scandinavian blonde wood partitions dividing bedroom and bathroom slide open and voila, you having a soak just steps away from your plush, inviting bed. To be frank, the arrangement (the cube shaped tubs easily fit two) is conducive to frolicking, as are the huge walk-in showers and the six-foot mirrors.
The neighboring Mercer Kitchen houses a bar, usually crammed with well-heeled Manhattanites gossiping, smoking, and sporting plenty of Prada-clad attitude, while the restaurant is French family dining, as interpreted by uber-chef Jean Georges Vongerichten and is booked out weeks in advance.
Surprisingly, perhaps, the Mercer is a good hotel for families - babies can sleep in Frette lined cribs, complete with toys - and while the staff may be well-dressed, they don't put on any airs: they will get you anything from Assam teabags to a bikini wax in your room at two in the morning. You never have to step foot outside the Mercer for want of anything; and in New York terms, that is living at its most decadent.
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