Hotel Elysée New York Reopens at 100, Monkey Bar Included
On 12 November, Elysée New York announced its return. The hotel on East 54th Street opened in 1926, closed for a full redesign, and will welcome guests again in early 2027, just as it turns 100.
It also comes back with a new family. The Elysée is now the first hotel of Wunderkind Hotels & Resorts, a new collection of boutique hotels from Hera Hospitality Group. The creative lead is the German designer and art collector Wolfgang Joop, with his partner and creative director Edwin Lemberg.
What changes
The work took 18 months. Here is what has been confirmed so far:
83 rooms and suites, down from around 100 before the work
interiors by Wolfgang Joop, built around art and craft
membership of The Leading Hotels of the World
a new lounge on the second floor, Salon Sanssouci
a partnership with the longevity clinic Hamptons BioMed, for face and body treatments a short walk from the hotel
The full design hasn't been shown yet. The hotel says more details will come before the opening.
The address does a lot of the work. The hotel sits between Madison Avenue and Park Avenue. Fifth Avenue, Rockefeller Center and the Museum of Modern Art are each about seven minutes away on foot, and Central Park is nine.
The Monkey Bar stays
This is the part regulars cared about most. The Monkey Bar has been part of the hotel since the 1930s, and it isn't going anywhere. The red leather booths are still there, and so are the painted walls: the monkey murals by the caricaturist Charlie Wala, and the big Jazz Age mural by Ed Sorel that arrived with the 2009 restoration.
The monkey has become the symbol of the whole brand. Joop grew up near Sanssouci Palace in Potsdam, and the new lounge takes its name from there. Sanssouci means "without worries" in French.
Salon Sanssouci will run from early morning to late evening under the Austrian chef Eduard Frauneder. The detail I like most is the afternoon one. Every day from 3pm to 5pm the salon serves Kaffee und Kuchen, the German habit of coffee and cake. The hotel says Joop does the same at home every day.
A hundred years of guests
Most historic hotels have one famous guest. This one has a full cast, and the hotel tells the stories itself.
Tennessee Williams lived here for 15 years and wrote late into the night. When a guest complained at 5am about the typing next door, the hotel moved the guest.
Tallulah Bankhead stayed 18 years. She shared her suite with a mynah bird called Gaylord, a monkey and a lion cub named Winston Churchill.
Marlon Brando ate peanut butter straight from the jar.
Ava Gardner sunbathed on the terraces and was said to eat coconut cake all day. The cake is on the new menu.
Jimi Hendrix played guitar at night until the noise complaints added up.
You can buy old furniture for a new hotel. A guest list like this takes a century.
The brand behind it
The hotel was bought in 2024, and the Elysée is only the start. Wunderkind lists three more places as coming soon:
Berlin, in a historic building Joop has known since childhood
the Okavango Delta in Botswana
Mykonos
Hera's chairman, Daniel Schneider, says the brand is for travellers who "value character and creative energy over convention". Joop put it in his own way: "I do not decorate a building like that. I listen to it, and then I answer."
My take
I like this news more than most hotel openings this year.
Start with the room count. Fewer rooms in the same building means bigger rooms and more staff per guest. Many owners do the opposite and squeeze more keys into old walls. Going from around 100 to 83 tells me they are aiming up.
The timing helps too. New York is about to lose one of its great names for a while: The Plaza closes in January for at least four years. Travellers who love old New York hotels will be looking for a room with history, and a 100-year-old address with a famous bar downstairs is a very good answer.
And they kept what matters. The easy move was to gut the place and open a white lobby that could be anywhere. The Monkey Bar is still there, with its murals, and so is the coconut cake.
The open question is the design. So far we've seen only a few first images of a room: dark wood, brass, a tassel on the door. It looks rich and a bit theatrical, which fits a hotel that once housed a lion cub. I want to see the finished rooms before I say more. A designer with a strong hand can lift a historic hotel or cover it, and Joop's line about listening to the building first is the right promise.
One thing is already clear. The best new hotels right now are often old buildings with a story, as I wrote in luxury hotels that were once prisons, banks and embassies. The Elysée never stopped being a hotel, and it still has more stories than most of them.
If you want to know why the same room can have two prices, read how private hotel rates work.
Would you pick a room for the stories its walls could tell?
