New York’s Benjamin Hotel Shines After A Multimillion-Dollar Transformation

The Benjamin was always something of a sleeper hit among Manhattan luxury hotels. It stayed under the radar. It never had the swagger of Ian Schrager's 1990s boutique hotels, nor the pedigreed signatures of today's heavyweight-branded hotels. But it had something harder to pin down: discretion, timelessness, a focus on comfort without the big splash.

And now, just a couple of years before its centennial, it has a new look that's bringing it firmly into the 21st century. It also has a new brand affiliation—and a mouthful of a name, the Benjamin Royal Sonesta New York —as part of the Sonesta group of more than 1,000 hotels across North America. But even with the new flag, it has its own classic identity: something like a residential-style members club that's steeped in history.

After the $25 million renovation, the hotel is graced with a new lobby—a small, discreet space to receive guests with a reception desk that's detailed like a cigar box—and a new look for the 209 guest rooms and suites. (Phase 2, including a new restaurant, is expected by the spring.) As before, those rooms are residential in style and well above the city's average in size, starting at around 300 square feet, mixing old-school elegance with contemporary details. Or, as general manager Simon Chapman describes it, "timeless pied-à-terre allure."

To understand the current-day hotel and its renovation, it's useful to understand its history. The neo-Romanesque building, the work of architect Emery Roth, began life as the Beverly Hotel in 1927. At the time, the 26-floor building was important enough to the city skyline that Georgia O'Keeffe took it as the subject of her 1929 work "New York Night." Years later, in 2017, the city designated the hotel as a landmark.

Meanwhile, in 1999, a change in management resulted in the Beverly being renamed the Benjamin. And in 2024, the renovation designers had some fun with that. They conjured fictional friends "Ben" and "Bev" and used them to give the hotel masculine architectural elements like bold lines and rich leather, along with feminine details like gilded curves, intricate patterns and soft colors.

Whatever you think of that interplay, there's no question that even the smallest rooms feel larger and airier. Their color palette was brightened up, the lighting is from new Lutron systems, warm walnut wood brings a patina, and the fusty old carpet came out to make way for herringbone hardwood floors. Vintage photography connects the past and the present.

The biggest enhancements are in the top rooms. The two signature suites reference the designers' fictional characters. The feminine-feeling Beverly Suite has curvaceous furnishings, a pretty floral-print headboard and patterned wallpaper, while the Benjamin Suite has more assertive architectural features and furniture like leather wingback dining chairs, a burl wood conference table and a menswear-inspired desk. Both suites have lavish outdoor space, something of a rarity in midtown Manhattan.

But even the smallest rooms have all sorts of niceties: galley kitchens, minibars stocked with mocktails, sleeper sofas, blackout curtains, and gas-filled double-paned windows that make the rooms quite quiet by New York City standards. In fact, sleep has long been a priority for the Benjamin. Way back in 1999, well before sleep became sexy, the hotel invested in its Rest & Renew program, which includes a pillow menu with ten choices (with preferences saved for returning guests), on-demand guided meditations, and sleep paraphernalia like eye masks and earplugs.

Now they've added a bedtime reading library of books guests can download to their Kindles and a children's sleep program. Even with renovations and rebranding that pull it up from under the radar and make the "sleeper hit" label harder to use, it's still a hit when it comes to a good night's sleep.

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