Why you should experience The William Hotel Midtown in New York, NY.
The William Hotel Midtown is a chromatic boutique hotel where Murray Hill's brownstone intimacy, Midtown's design culture, artistic experimentation and residential discretion converge inside a six-story Beaux-Arts house conceived as a three-dimensional painting.
Set along East 39th Street near Madison Avenue and just steps from The Morgan Library & Museum, the property was transformed by In Situ Design, Lilian B Interiors and artist William Engel through a collaboration deliberately dissolving the boundaries between architecture, furniture and painting. Engel's abstract compositions establish distinct chromatic identities across the floors, with blue, teal, pink, green, orange and yellow migrating from canvases onto ceilings, niches, headboards, carpets and furniture. Neutral gray tweed tempers those saturated surfaces, while studios and suites incorporate kitchenettes that preserve the building's extended-stay residential premise. The result is a hotel where William Engel's paintings become inhabitable space, giving Murray Hill's restrained architectural character an unexpectedly immersive artistic interior.
What you should know about The William Hotel Midtown.
The William Hotel Midtown is best known for opening in January 2014 after two classic Midtown brownstones were transformed into an extended-stay boutique property through an unusually integrated collaboration between In Situ Design, Lilian B Interiors and artist William Engel. The original project contained 33 guest suites, while the current configuration comprises 32 custom-designed rooms, suites and studios across six floors, preserving the property's intimate scale while supporting both short and extended stays. Engel created paintings specifically for the project, and the design team translated their abstract color fields into entire architectural environments, assigning individual floors monochromatic palettes of blue, teal, pink, green, orange and yellow and allowing pigment to migrate conceptually from canvas across ceilings, floating walls, niches, bed linens, carpets and furniture. In Situ Design described the governing ambition as making art and room indistinguishable, while Lilian B Interiors characterized the finished environment as a livable three-dimensional painting, with gray tweed furnishings providing deliberate neutrality against the saturated color fields. Current accommodations retain the residential component through studios equipped with two-burner cooktops, cookware, tableware, refrigerators and additional kitchen equipment, preserving the extended-stay logic that distinguished the property at its debut.
The project's authorship becomes more consequential through the way William Engel's paintings dictated architecture. Corridors initiate each floor's color field before those pigments intensify across guestroom planes and furnishings, creating a progression in saturation as guests move from circulation space into private accommodation. The design team imagined paint being poured through openings in the roof and descending through the building, an organizing conceit expressed through bold rectangles appearing unexpectedly across ceilings, niches, headboards and carpets. The six-story Beaux-Arts structure consequently functions as the stable historical container for an interior governed by contemporary abstraction, while kitchen-equipped studios introduce another layer by allowing guests to inhabit those compositions for extended periods. The William remains a particularly rigorous example of hotel design conceived from a single artist's visual language, with Engel, In Situ Design and Lilian B Interiors treating color itself as an architectural material.
How to fold The William Hotel Midtown into your trip.
The William Hotel Midtown works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing architecture, decorative craftsmanship and artistic experimentation through the blocks surrounding Murray Hill and Bryant Park.
Begin at Scandinavia House, where architect James Stewart Polshek created a contemporary cultural center for the American-Scandinavian Foundation, bringing Nordic art, design, exhibitions and material culture into a restrained Park Avenue building that establishes a natural design-focused opening to the afternoon. Continue to New York Public Library, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, where Carrère and Hastings completed their grand Beaux-Arts composition in 1911, surrounding vast reading rooms with marble, murals, carved ornament and an architectural program that turned scholarship into civic theater. Conclude at International Center of Photography, where an institution founded by Cornell Capa in 1974 continues examining photography and visual culture through exhibitions, education and an archive spanning documentary practice, photojournalism and contemporary image-making. The progression moves from Scandinavian design through Beaux-Arts craftsmanship into photography's evolving visual language, creating a study of how architecture and images shape experience that naturally echoes The William Hotel Midtown's own conversion of painting into inhabitable space.
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