Why The Surrey matters.
The Surrey, A Corinthia Hotel, New York is a revived hotel where Upper East Side's residential refinement meets Schwartz & Gross's 1926 architecture, Martin Brudnizki's layered interiors and Corinthia Hotels' first North American property.
Set along East 76th Street near Madison Avenue and just steps from Central Park, the hotel occupies a tree-lined residential block between 5th Avenue's cultural institutions, Madison Avenue's luxury houses and the limestone townhouses and apartment buildings extending through the East 70s. Schwartz & Gross composed the sixteen-story building in grey brick with an ashlar limestone base, terra-cotta ornament, carved floral entrance details, upper-level terraces and a central balcony that preserve the scale and decorative discipline of the neighborhood's 1920s apartment hotels. BKSK Architects restored the masonry and reorganized the building around a renewed entrance and rooftop addition, with Martin Brudnizki Design Studio carrying the transformation inward through muted colors, bespoke furniture, Murano chandeliers and subtle Art Deco references. Brudnizki's interiors preserve a residential character through layered textiles, crafted details and intimate rooms, connecting the new design with the building's original purpose as an apartment hotel. The result is a hotel whose restored prewar architecture and contemporary decorative authorship renew a nearly century-old Upper East Side address through a distinctly residential form of hospitality.
What defines The Surrey.
The Surrey, A Corinthia Hotel, New York is best known for reopening on October 25, 2024 after a four-year closure and comprehensive transformation that established Corinthia Hotels' first property in North America. Schwartz & Gross designed the original Surrey as a sixteen-story neo-Classical apartment hotel erected in 1925 and 1926 for 22 East 76th Street, Inc. Five nineteenth-century rowhouses were demolished for the project, which entered an Upper East Side undergoing a major expansion of luxury apartment living during the 1920s. The building opened as a residence hotel in 1926 and developed a reputation for discretion that attracted long-term residents and prominent figures including Bette Davis, Claudette Colbert and John F. Kennedy. Daniel Boulud opened the original Daniel within The Surrey in 1993, beginning a culinary relationship with the building that continued when he moved his flagship restaurant in 1998 and replaced it at the hotel with Café Boulud. Denihan Hospitality Group completed a $60 million transformation in 2009 under interior architect Lauren Rottet, whose design incorporated a contemporary-art collection anchored by a grand Chuck Close mosaic depicting Kate Moss. The hotel closed in 2020 during the pandemic, ending the Denihan operating chapter and the long relationship with Café Boulud. Reuben Brothers acquired the property for $151.15 million in December 2020 and announced a partnership with Corinthia Hotels and Casa Tua the following year. BKSK Architects led the architectural transformation, restoring exterior masonry, creating a new entrance within existing openings, adding a rooftop structure and reorganizing significant portions of the interior. Corinthia reopened the property in 2024 under its historic Surrey name, linking Schwartz & Gross's original apartment hotel with a new ownership, design and operating chapter almost a century after the building's completion.
Martin Brudnizki Design Studio developed the reopened property around an interpretation of American Art Deco filtered through the residential character of the Upper East Side. Bespoke furniture, Murano chandeliers, patterned textiles and vintage-inspired detailing build visual depth through individual objects and crafted surfaces across the public interiors. Brudnizki connected four signature suites with Central Park bridges, translating Bow Bridge, Greywacke Arch, Pine Bank Bridge and Bethesda Terrace into crown moldings and hand-painted illustrations concealed within armoires. Jasper Johns, Helen Frankenthaler, Milton Hebald, Elizabeth Gregory-Gruen, Bruce Porter, Mori Shizume and Arlina Cai contribute to the art program within the signature accommodations, giving those interiors a substantial independent collection. Casa Tua brought founders Miky and Leticia Herrera-Grendene's hospitality concept to New York for the first time after establishing its original Miami Beach location and later expanding to Aspen and Paris. Michele Bönan designed the Casa Tua interiors, creating a separate decorative chapter within the building through Italian-inflected rooms connected to a restaurant, lounge and private members' club. The property earned One MICHELIN Key in 2025, placing the reopened hotel within MICHELIN's second global hotel selection one year after its return. Corinthia's arrival also carried a company founded in Malta in 1962 into the United States for the first time, making the East 76th Street project a consequential international expansion for the hotel group. Reuben Brothers, Corinthia, Brudnizki, BKSK, Bönan and the Herrera-Grendenes transformed The Surrey through distinct architectural, artistic and hospitality disciplines while preserving the residential character that had defined the address since 1926.
How The Surrey fits.
The Surrey, A Corinthia Hotel, New York works as an Upper East Side base for an outing connecting Henry Clay Frick's conversion of private collecting into a public institution, a 5th Avenue mansion devoted to Austrian and German modernism and Andrew Carnegie's domestic world transformed into a national design museum.
Begin at The Frick Collection, created from the 5th Avenue residence and extraordinary art holdings of industrialist Henry Clay Frick. Carrère and Hastings designed Frick's mansion beginning in 1913, and Frick left the house, furnishings and collection for conversion into a public gallery after his wife Adelaide's lifetime. John Russell Pope added galleries, program spaces and the Garden Court before the museum opened in 1935, creating an institutional setting for works by Bellini, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Velázquez, Goya, Gainsborough and other European masters. Selldorf Architects completed the building's first comprehensive renovation in almost ninety years before its 5th Avenue reopening in April 2025, opening the former second-floor private rooms to the public and renewing the historic ensemble. Continue to Neue Galerie New York, housed in the William Starr Miller residence completed by Carrère and Hastings in 1914. Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt III later occupied the mansion, followed by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, before Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky acquired it in 1994 for a museum devoted to early twentieth-century German and Austrian art. Annabelle Selldorf restored and adapted the building before Neue Galerie opened in 2001, establishing a permanent setting for Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, Vasily Kandinsky, Josef Hoffmann and other central figures of Viennese and German modernism. Conclude at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, housed in the mansion Andrew Carnegie commissioned from Babb, Cook & Willard and completed in 1902. Carnegie equipped the residence with one of the earliest structural steel frames used in an American private house, a passenger elevator and central heating, combining technological experimentation with Georgian Revival architecture. The Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration joined the Smithsonian in 1967, moved into the Carnegie mansion in 1970 and reopened there in 1976 as the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, establishing the former industrialist's home as the nation's museum devoted to historical and contemporary design. The progression moves from Frick, Carrère and Hastings's union of private residence and European collecting through Lauder, Sabarsky and Selldorf's institution for Austrian and German modernism and culminates in Carnegie's technologically ambitious mansion becoming a national design museum, placing The Surrey, A Corinthia Hotel, New York within an Upper East Side culture shaped by residences transformed into enduring cultural institutions.
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