Sipping a martini or Manhattan in a gold-lit banquette at the Carlyle’s Bemelmans Bar is possibly the ultimate in urban sophistication.

Check in to this brick gothic revival favourite for a taste of old New York. The former seminary (which was built on part of the estate owned by Twas the Night Before Christmas author Clement Clarke Moore) has 60 rooms, with period fireplaces and mantels, antique furniture and carpets, and reproduction 19th-century wallpaper.

This elegant five-star hotel just off Madison Avenue provides white-glove service to its guests and has just 74 guest rooms, with sophisticated decor from London architect Mark Pinney and American interior designer Michael S Smith.

Get caught between the moon and New York City by staying in one of this five-star hotel’s 244 guest rooms and suites (all above the 35th floor sky lobby), which deliver floor-to-ceiling windows and views of either the south side of Central Park or the Hudson River and West Side towers.

Soundproof windows, goose-down duvets and hand-drawn clouds on the wallpaper insulate guests from the thrumming buzz of Central Park South at this 1930 landmark hotel — all the better to allow the senses to be filled with wide open views of Central Park stretching away uptown.

This neo-Italian Renaissance pad in midtown Manhattan was designed by the beaux-arts architects McKim, Mead & White and is on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Evelyn’s lobby is full of nods to the Jazz Age, from art deco brass rails to syncopated designs on the glass lights to velvet — all notes that are echoed in the sophisticated Bar Benno, with its large marble bar and tubular lights and Benno restaurant.

This landmark boutique hotel, just steps from the heart of the Theater District and Times Square, was designed by architect Stanford White (of McKim, Mead & White) for the Lambs in 1905, a theatrical club whose members included the Barrymores, Charlie Chaplin and Cecil B DeMille.

This modern hotel’s greenery-filled atrium is a nod to the neighbourhood’s wholesale florists and nurseries whose wares often line the streets — expect everything from evergreen shrubs to palms to peonies.

It’s hard to beat this modern hotel’s location on Fifth Avenue directly across from the grand New York Public Library and its two marble lions, Patience and Fortitude. The lobby library even has a rotating book collection curated by the local librarians across the street.