Checking-in to The Mark, New York

INSPIRATION | CABANA TRAVEL | WORLD OF CABANA

A favorite of the Met Gala’s biggest stars, The Mark is as much a New York institution as it is a hotel. Reimagined by renowned French interior designer Jacques Grange, its 1920s architecture frames a world of confident interiors, impeccable service and Upper East Side glamour, where the spectacle of fashion’s most celebrated night meets the warmth and ease of a much-loved home.

BY CAMILLA FRANCES | CABANA TRAVEL | 9 NOVEMBER 2026

Manhattan views from the terrace of The Mark's 10,000 square foot penthouse © The Mark. 

Turn the corner from Fifth Avenue onto East 77th Street on the first Monday in May and you will find, more often than not, a small riot of photographers pointed at a black and white striped awning. This is not The Met itself — the landmark museum is just four short blocks away — but its unofficial green room, the place where roughly 50 of the Met Gala's biggest names will spend their day being dressed, pinned, brushed and readied before the short, absurdly slow drive to the museum steps.

There are many hotels in New York with more rooms, more history, bigger rooftops, bigger spas and more square footage of marble, but there is only one Jacques Grange-designed hotel where Anna Wintour, Rihanna, Irina Shayk's dog and Simon Porte Jacquemus' 80-year-old grandmother – imported from France for the occasion – have all, within the same hour, passed through the same lobby. That hotel is The Mark.

The building itself long predates its current fame. Raised in 1927 in a confident neo-Italian Renaissance style on the corner of Madison Avenue, it opened life as an apartment hotel for the Upper East Side's upper echelons, cycling through incarnations — the Hyde Park, briefly the Madison Avenue Hotel — before closing altogether in 2006. It was bought that same year by Izak Senbahar, an ebullient Turkish-born, engineering-trained developer with a self-confessed interior design obsession.

Senbahar had spent years following the work of the French decorator Jacques Grange, admiring what Grange had done for clients like Yves Saint Laurent and the Princess of Monaco. The two eventually met over lunch at Caviar Kaspia in Paris and, as Senbahar tells me, fast became good friends. Their friendship is now well into its second decade and remains close and productive enough that Grange can send Senbahar a sketch, he says, and the pair can build a room from it without a second conversation.

Speaking to Cabana for Issue 26, Grange told me he wanted The Mark's guests to feel they had arrived at a private New York residence rather than a traditional hotel. "My role is never to impose a signature, but to interpret the spirit of a place," he said. "The Mark was conceived as a place where sophistication feels effortless. I wanted to capture New York’s confidence while introducing a certain French sense of proportion, elegance, and comfort. The dialogue between the two cities is what gives the hotel its identity."

The Mark's marble stripe-floored lobby @ The Mark.

What Grange delivered in 2009 was a full reinvention of The Mark rather than a restoration. The building's pre-war bones stayed exactly where they were and everything inside them was rebuilt around a new visual language: geometric, confident, unmistakably Parisian in its restraint and unmistakably New York in its nerve. The lobby's black-and-white striped marble floor, arguably one of the most photographed areas of square footage in Manhattan hospitality, was Grange's invention, anchored by a jolt of red and furnished with pieces that read like a small art collection: a chandelier by Ron Arad, rock-crystal sconces by Mattia Bonetti, a sculptural sofa by Vladimir Kagan, and even artwork contributed by Karl Lagerfeld himself.

Upstairs, the 152 bedrooms and suites carry the same instinct: ebony, sycamore and granite furnishings, marble bathrooms with black-and-white striped floors and striking vanities. This culminated, in 2015, with a 10,000-square-foot penthouse that remains the largest hotel suite in the US, a space so vast its living room can be reconfigured into a working ballroom when necessary. I was given a tour while the suite was unoccupied – it's often booked out for several weeks by loyal, long-term guests – and was dutifully wowed; the expansive terrace has some of the most spectacular rooftop views in a city that excels at them.

The Mark's famous Jacques Grange-designed bathrooms © The Mark.

While it’s a fairly unforgivable cliche to say a hotel feels like a home, I had the warmest of welcomes each time I walked through the lobby and was on first-name terms with the doormen within hours. They can usually be found giving guests’ and neighbours’ dogs treats or sharing Upper East Side tips. No request was a problem, no reservation impossible, everything was answered with a smile, and within minutes. And those spa-like Jacques Grange bathrooms? They’re still as good as it gets, still after all these years.

It's easy to see why the Met Gala adopted The Mark as its staging ground almost as soon as Grange had finished with it. The hotel now treats the day like a military operation: a manual-elevator system worked out to the minute, hundreds of coffees poured before noon and a discreet staircase route for anyone who would rather not be photographed leaving. When the Gala ends, the choreography reverses: the lobby fills again, this time with a hot dog cart, French fries and the hotel's long-serving bartender pouring drinks to a crowd.

The Mark's 10,000 square foot penthouse © The Mark

Senbahar talks about The Mark less as a single asset than a prototype he has spent years perfecting, with an eye now on Paris and London. Sitting with him over coffee at Caviar Kaspia, we discuss a project that is so much more than a commercial venture. He is warm with every member of staff, taking time to ask about their day or their family, and we talk at length about the design process with Grange and the dilemmas he faced during Covid in particular. Impressively, he chose to keep the hotel open throughout the pandemic, protecting both staff jobs and a handful of long-term residents in the hotel’s suites.

That same energy shows in the hotel's cultural footprint beyond the gala — its striped floor has turned up on screen in Succession and And Just Like That – and does not excludes The Mark's quieter, everyday self. This includes the Jean-Georges Vongerichten's restaurant downstairs, a Caviar Kaspia outpost built, fittingly, from the same Paris friendship that produced the renovation, a Frédéric Fekkai salon, a John Lobb shoe valet, a bookstore and a bar that has, on any ordinary Tuesday, nothing whatsoever to do with fashion's biggest night. But the Gala has a way of clarifying what a hotel is for. The Mark was built, quite deliberately perhaps, to be a space where guests can be their most unencumbered public, and private, selves.