New-look New York

It is both ironic and appropriate that New York's latest small luxury establishment, the City Club Hotel, should stare directly across West 44th Street at the archetype of Nineties lobby-as-nightclub culture: Ian Schrager's Royalton.

One is a discreet new fusion of dark Honduran wood, chocolate marble, bronze and matt limestone, all angles; the other a ghostly postmodern ballroom of linen-shrouded club chairs, Day-Glo walls and outmodedly jokeyspiky barstools. Hop between the two and you suddenly see a designhotel decade bookended - how Schrager's once cutting-edge theatricality now seems nostalgic.

By contrast, the 65-room City Club Hotel is so cleanly contemporary you could eat your fromage blanc tart with wild berries and pistachio icecream (from in-house DB Bistro Moderne) straight off its shiny, designer-cork floors. Just when you thought snotty models-as-receptionists and camp, cramped, lime and chrome bedrooms were the only way to stay, one man has come to the rescue.

"It's so disgusting to have to walk through a nightclub to check in," sniffs 31-year-old, first-time hotelier Jeff Klein, confidant of Park Avenue socialites. "A lobby needs to be a discreet experience: you're not checking people in, you're receiving them."

Klein's City Club Hotel, which opens its subtly chic doors this month overshadowed by Dorothy Parker's neighbouring Algonquin, is quintessentially anti-lobby, with everything that implies: no reception-as-social-watering-hole, no red ropes, no rude staff (Klein interviewed 800 potentials for seven jobs) and no flimsy fashion interiors. Behind the slabby limestone, barely logo'd CCH facade is the definitive millennial, small luxury (not boutique) hotel. "Boutique has all the connotations of a trendy, Ninetiestype property," shudders Klein. "I want to be disassociated from that."

A hotel with style rather than trend: Klein's new sensuous, sumptuous direction is discernible not only in the materials wielded by interior designer Jeffrey Bilhuber - who has worked privately for the likes of Anna Wintour and David Bowie - but in the accessories. Where predecessors pioneered the single, giant lily in strange vase, Klein and Bilhuber have lined spaces with framed playbills (in homage to CCH's theatre-district setting), monochrome abstract art and books. "Lots and lots of books," exclaims Bilhuber. Volumes on Ernst and Man Ray tower about bedrooms and public areas - yours to pick up, browse, take downstairs and swap. "The movement of books," he suggests, "helps personalise space."

Personal, intimate and sensitive are recurring words. CCH respects the shell's heritage as a turn-of-the 20th century gentleman's club: venerable damask across Queen Anne armchairs; deep mahogany framing windows; lavishly clad Italian marble bathrooms lined with Hermès unguents and possessed of tubs or walk-in showers beside great white porcelain pedestal sinks. In bedrooms, corrugated plaster walls were hand-combed in California.

Below rows of clubby, wallmounted reading lamps, custommade beds meld soft top mattresses and firm lower ones, with Frette 320-thread-count linen for the deepest cocooning slumber one is ever likely to get in the city that never sleeps. The overall result is historically respectful without being nostalgic. "This hotel is not trying to reinvent the wheel," Bilhuber explains. "It should be familiar when you walk in, and doubly so when you walk out."

? City Club Hotel (001 212 921 5500), 55 West 44th Street, New York; doubles from about £160 a night B&B.