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The Chatwal

New York City, New York, United States · Unbound Collection · Core Luxury

The Chatwal: The Chatwal, a Luxury Collection Hotel – Hotel Review | Condé Nast TravelerThe Chatwal: The Chatwal- Deluxe New York, NY Hotels- GDS Reservation Codes: Travel WeeklyThe Chatwal: Luxury Manhattan Hotel - Historic NYC Hotel | The Chatwal, New York

Stanford White designed the 1905 Lambs Club clubhouse at 130 West 44th Street for America's oldest professional theatrical club; a 1915 George Freeman wing doubled it before financial sales, a Nazarene mission, and Lamb's Theatre years. Hampshire Hotels of the Chatwal family reopened Thierry Despont's hotel and Lambs Club restaurant in 2010 under The Luxury Collection. Ram heads still mark the landmark brick facade near Times Square.

About The Chatwal

History

The building at 130 West 44th Street was designed for the most theatrical of purposes. Stanford White, the brilliant and notorious partner of McKim, Mead and White — the firm behind the Washington Square Arch, the original Pennsylvania Station, Madison Square Garden, and scores of the most significant buildings in the American Renaissance — took the commission from the Lambs in 1903 and created a clubhouse fit for the profession it served. The Lambs, America's oldest professional theatrical club, had been founded in 1874 by a group of actors who named their organization after a similar London club, which in turn honored the essayist Charles Lamb, friend of actors and the theater. By 1902 the club had outgrown its previous quarters and sought White, himself a member, to create a permanent home.

White designed the original six-story building in the Colonial Revival style with neo-Georgian details, its brick, marble, and terracotta facade ornamented with six ram heads and two ram profiles — a punning reference to the Lambs' name that made the building recognizable from the street. The first floor contained a lobby, a billiard room, and a grill room; the second a banquet hall; the third a small theater; the upper floors offices and sleeping quarters for members. White received the Lambs' commission in 1903, the building opened on September 1, 1905, and that same year White was murdered — shot on the rooftop of his Madison Square Garden by millionaire Harry Kendall Thaw, who blamed White for a love affair with his wife Evelyn Nesbit. White had designed the building that now bore the fingerprints of one of the most sensational crimes of the Gilded Age.

A 1915 addition by George A. Freeman doubled the building's footprint, extending it westward in a matching style. The Lambs' golden age ran through the early twentieth century, when the membership included John Barrymore, Fred Astaire, Spencer Tracy, and virtually every significant figure in American theatrical life. The 1920s brought competition from talking pictures, the 1930s brought financial distress, and by 1975 the club was sold at auction. The Church of the Nazarene purchased the building and used it as a mission while the theaters were leased to an off-Broadway venue called the Lamb's Theatre.

In 2006 Hampshire Hotels, operated by the family of Vikram Chatwal, purchased the building from the church and commissioned Thierry Despont — one of the world's leading architects of luxury interiors, responsible for the restoration of the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc and the renovation of the Plaza Hotel — to transform the Lambs Club into a hotel. Despont preserved the Federal-style paneled library that Stanford White had designed, the Italian marble Renaissance fireplace White had donated to the club, and the Grille Room and War Memorial that defined the building's institutional character. Where the original Lambs members had slept in club rooms, guests now occupied 76 rooms and suites with Art Deco interiors, suede wall coverings, and leather-wrapped closets. The building, designated a New York City landmark in 1974 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places, became The Chatwal in 2010.

White's building on Theater Row remains two blocks from Times Square and steps from Broadway's finest houses — precisely the address its architect would have chosen, in the heart of the city whose theatrical ambitions the Lambs had done so much to advance.

The setting

The Chatwal occupies the 1905 Stanford White-designed landmark at 130 West 44th Street, originally built as the Lambs Club — America's first professional theatrical club, whose Shepherd roster included John Barrymore, Fred Astaire, and Douglas Fairbanks. White's neo-Georgian façade, ornamented with carved ram heads, is a designated New York City landmark on the very block that anchored Broadway's golden age. Times Square is one minute on foot, Rockefeller Center six minutes, and Grand Central Terminal eleven minutes away. Restored in 2010 with Art Deco-inspired interiors by Thierry Despont, the building fuses the heritage of a century-old theatrical institution with contemporary luxury.

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