Why you should experience The Whitby Hotel in New York, NY.
The Whitby Hotel is a jubilant luxury hotel where Midtown's cultural polish, 5th Avenue sophistication, contemporary craftsmanship and cosmopolitan confidence converge within Kit Kemp's intensely personal celebration of color and collecting.
Set along West 56th Street near 5th Avenue and just steps from Central Park, the 86-room property became Firmdale Hotels' second New York address when founders Tim and Kit Kemp opened it in February 2017 following Crosby Street Hotel's success downtown. Kit Kemp conceived all 16 floors individually, combining patterned textiles, bespoke furniture, original artworks, floor-to-ceiling windows and guestrooms. Her own Travelling Light fabric, developed with Christopher Farr Cloth, even wraps columns inside The Whitby Bar, turning structural surfaces into another opportunity for pattern. The result is a hotel where Kemp's conviction that hospitality should provoke curiosity gives Midtown an exuberant interior world assembled through art, textiles, craftsmanship and fearless individuality.
What you should know about The Whitby Hotel.
The Whitby Hotel is best known for opening in February 2017 as Tim and Kit Kemp's second Firmdale Hotels property in New York, introducing 86 individually designed rooms and suites across 16 floors after the couple established their first American hotel, Crosby Street Hotel, in SoHo in 2009. Kit Kemp personally directed the interiors, giving each accommodation an individual color scheme while combining floor-to-ceiling windows, marble or granite bathrooms, original artworks, custom furniture and private terraces in selected suites. Kemp extended that authorship into textiles through Travelling Light, a geometric fabric she developed with Christopher Farr Cloth and used to upholster columns inside The Whitby Bar, while the hotel's wider collection incorporates one-of-a-kind artworks and handcrafted objects throughout its public spaces. A dedicated Drawing Room operates as a residential retreat with a guest Honesty Bar, while the Orangery introduces a light-filled transition toward the interior courtyard and The Whitby Bar & Restaurant centers its room around a substantial pewter-topped bar. The property's creative program also includes three private event rooms and a dedicated screening room, allowing Firmdale's established relationship between hospitality, art and cinema to occupy substantially more than the guestrooms. In 2025, The Whitby Hotel received Three MICHELIN Keys, placing the property within the guide's highest hotel distinction eight years after its debut.
The art collection gives Kemp's decorative style another layer of authorship, with contemporary works functioning as integral parts of the interiors and individual pieces inspiring experiences beyond their immediate settings. Dutch designer Maarten Baas's grandfather-style clock in the lobby turns timekeeping into performance through a figure that appears to redraw the hands minute by minute, while British artist Joe Tilson contributes the bold visual language of the stairwell mural. Kemp's approach reaches its clearest expression inside accommodations such as Suite 802, where raspberry walls meet Soane Britain's Botanic Garden fabric in Rhubarb, textured linen, antique furniture and Midtown views through full-height glazing. Those combinations demonstrate the collecting philosophy behind Firmdale more clearly than any single decorative signature, allowing contemporary art, commissioned textiles, antiques and handcrafted furniture to accumulate into rooms that feel authored.
How to fold The Whitby Hotel into your trip.
The Whitby Hotel works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing the decorative arts, intimate collections and cultivated design culture surrounding 5th Avenue.
Begin at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, where Andrew Carnegie's former 1902 mansion became the Smithsonian's design museum and now places centuries of decorative and contemporary design inside one of Manhattan's great surviving Gilded Age domestic settings. Continue to Neue Galerie New York, where Ronald Lauder and Serge Sabarsky's collection concentrates Austrian and German art and design from the early twentieth century inside the former William Starr Miller residence, creating an unusually intimate encounter with Klimt, Schiele and Wiener Werkstätte craftsmanship. Conclude at The Frick Collection, where Henry Clay Frick's Fifth Avenue residence brings Bellini, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Velázquez and decorative arts into rooms conceived around domestic scale, allowing the afternoon to culminate where collecting becomes an environment. The progression moves from design history through Viennese Gesamtkunstwerk into Frick's deeply personal synthesis of art and interiors, revealing the tradition of cultivated collecting that gives Kit Kemp's own layered vision at The Whitby Hotel such resonance.
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