citizenM New York Times Square

Please note: We are not taking reservations for this hotel at the current time.

It’s one thing to pull off “affordable luxury” in mid-market cities like Rotterdam and Glasgow, as the citizenM group has already done with aplomb, but to build a hotel like this in Times Square is pretty much unheard of. An exceedingly comfortable, visually stylish, reasonably priced hotel just isn’t supposed to exist here, where the real-estate costs are astronomical and the usual standards of “hospitality” stretch the limits of the term. The fact that citizenM has also made room for some seriously inviting public spaces, from the soaring Vitra-furnished lobby lounge to the rooftop Cloud Bar — well, it’s just about got us reaching into the bag of forbidden New York clichés for a good, emphatic “fuhgettaboutit.”

The key to making it work is citizenM’s extraordinary efficiency. There’s no ordinary reception desk, just a self-serve kiosk for quick, contact-free check-in. And while the rooms are small, the fact is that Manhattan hotel rooms, at this price anyway, are almost always small, and they rarely look this good, or work this well. Beneath your wall-to-wall window is an extra-large king-size bed wrapped in ultra-soft, high-thread-count Italian linens and topped with fluffy down pillows. There’s a high-tech MoodPad (and a downloadable phone app) for controlling everything from the ambient lighting to the free movies to the digital art on the wall. And off to the side is a shower pod that looks like it’s going to beam you up to the nearest hospitable planet, but in fact just houses a wonderfully high-pressure rain shower and some bespoke bath products by the “nose” behind the scents at Comme des Garçons. We could go on and on, but the point is that though the rooms are quite small, they’re very well appointed. And it bears mentioning that these spaces are made to be easily cleaned — if cleanliness really is next to godliness, then in one way, at least, this is heaven.

Not that this hotel is just a big box of little bedrooms. The hoteliers behind citizenM like to point out that, when you’re at home, you mostly use your bedroom for sleeping, spending the majority of your daytime hours in the living room and kitchen. With that in mind, they’ve designed the hotel to draw you out of the bedroom. The trick is to create an atmosphere that’s pleasantly social, but with enough comfortable nooks that it never feels like more of a scene than you want it to be. Even the high-design lobby has been infused with a certain informality and warmth, and they’ve given the twenty-four-hour canteen the feel of an open kitchen — the idea being that you can wander in and out of throughout the day and night, just as you would at home. The same make-yourself-comfortable vibe extends to the open-office-style mezzanine, to the garden-like terraces and yoga decks, and to the pair of attractive bars. And speaking of distractions, there’s also the small matter of those bright lights calling to you just outside the door.