Crosby Street Hotel, USA review: New York state of mind

Saska Graville star-spots at a SoHo boutique haven where the owner's distinctive style steals every scene.

Sit in the lobby of New York's Crosby Street Hotel long enough and the star-spotting will be impressive. You might spy Halle Berry wafting by ahead of her party that night in the function room downstairs, Daniel Day-Lewis hurrying up to his suite or Meg Ryan hunched over her laptop. And that's just the week I was staying. The likes of Sienna Miller and Tina Brown have already checked in (Brown hosted a screening in the private cinema downstairs) and Kate Winslet and Sam Mendes recommend the place to out-of-town friends. One thing's for sure, it may have only been open since the end of September but Crosby Street is already the new It hotel in a town that specialises in them.

Crosby has impeccable credentials. It's the first non-Britain opening from the Firmdale Hotels group, whose boutique London properties like Number Sixteen, Charlotte Street and the Covent Garden are favourites with in-the-know travellers who like a bit of style and personality with their room service. (Neale Whitaker and David Clark, the editors of Belle and Vogue Living respectively, rarely stay anywhere else.)

Co-owner Kit Kemp is renowned for her bold interiors, creating luxe spaces that are a riot of colour and pattern. At Crosby Street, she's excelled herself. Never mind the celeb-spotting in the foyer, check out the art. Kit and her husband Tim, are serious collectors of contemporary pieces and the lobby is more like a gallery space. A sculpture of a man's head by Jaume Plensa is to one side of the entrance, with an imposing Anselm Kiefer painting on the opposite wall. Everywhere you look there's something eye-catching, whether it's a piece of art, a cluster of objects like ceramic gourds (Kit fell in love with them and built a perspex box-table to display them in) or a striking floral arrangement.

If the lobby is like a hip SoHo gallery, then the drawing room is a gorgeous interiors store. It's here that guests can order tea and settle into a huge sofa for the afternoon. Again, Kit's eye for the offbeat has thrown together a mad mix of tribal prints, textured paintings, outsize portraits of Jack Russell dogs and paraphernalia like a collection of ceramic watering cans. She made the patchwork fabric for the sofa and threw Argentinian rugs over the dining chairs.

Crosby Street has a highly individual style that is uninfluenced by interiors trends. And that's what makes it unique. It takes a clever eye to make this madness work. I can't think of another hotel bar where the walls are hung with outlandish portraits of the Queen in floral collaged hats and a display of old fashioned Bakelite phones is turned into sculptural lights. Not to mention the outsize wooden dodo that sits among the bottles of drinks.

But there's much more to a five-star hotel than "wow" design. Crosby is a truly lovely place to stay. For a start, unlike in most New York hotels, the 86 rooms are all of a decent size. The new-build design incorporates a wall of floor-to-ceiling loft-style windows in every room and no room is smaller than one of those walls. In other words, they are generous. (A huge relief for anyone who has paid hefty New York hotel rates only to find themselves edging around their bed to get to the door.) And the mattresses? Now I understand why people get obsessed. After one night on a Simmons, I don't want to sleep on anything else.

In fact, everything about my suite was pretty much perfect. From the pink and orange embroidery on the padded bedhead topped with a Venetian glass coronet, to the walk-in wardrobe, to the huge marbled bathroom filled with items from cult London perfumier Miller Harris, it was a treat just to spend time in there. Sitting on the cushioned window seat gazing across to the grandly elegant loft spaces of SoHo, I didn't want to leave.