Faena New York

Faena New York opened in September 2025 on a stretch of the High Line that spent nearly a decade waiting for a very different hotel to appear. With Accor as its global partner, the 120-room property marks Alan Faena's theatrical, maximalist brand debut in Manhattan, arriving on a West Chelsea site once earmarked for Six Senses' first New York address before that project collapsed.

The place

The hotel occupies a Bjarke Ingels Group-designed tower at 500 West 18th Street, part of the mixed-use One High Line development in West Chelsea. It sits directly alongside the elevated park, within easy walking distance of Chelsea Market, the gallery cluster along West 20s and 24th Street, and the Chelsea Piers waterfront sports complex. Many rooms face the Hudson River, and the High Line itself effectively serves as the hotel's front garden despite being one of the city's most visited attractions. It is a location built for daytime gallery-hopping and late arrivals after dark, and Faena has shaped the hotel's public rooms with that rhythm in mind.

The concept

The site carries a well-documented false start. First announced in 2016 as part of a twin-tower project then known as the XI, the address was meant to house Six Senses New York, IHG's debut in the city, occupying the east tower alongside luxury condominiums. Developer HFZ Capital Group ran out of money before construction finished, and the site went into foreclosure in 2021. Witkoff Group and Len Blavatnik's Access Industries acquired the unfinished towers for roughly $900 million, renamed the project One High Line, and in 2022 signed Accor's Faena brand to fill the hotel component instead: closing the book on Six Senses New York before it ever opened a single room.

What opened in its place reads as unmistakably Faena rather than a retrofit of someone else's plan. Interiors were developed by Faena's in-house design studio working with Peter Mikic, layering the brand's signature exuberance (bold pattern, gilt detailing, a sense of staged spectacle carried over from Buenos Aires and Miami Beach) onto Bjarke Ingels' architecture. Forbes reported that director Baz Luhrmann, a longtime Faena collaborator, also shaped the property's aesthetic direction. Commissioned art fills the public spaces, and the hotel is programmed with a nightly rhythm of events that treats it as a stage rather than a backdrop. It is Faena's first outpost outside Argentina and Florida, testing whether that brand of maximalism translates for a Manhattan audience more accustomed to restraint.

Dining & wellness

Dining centers on La Boca, chef Francis Mallmann's Patagonian fire-cooking restaurant, set beneath pop-art murals by Edgardo Gimenez and chandeliers by Alberto Garutti, with La Cava operating alongside it as a second dining room. The Living Room pairs two Art Deco-style bars with an outdoor terrace, and El Secreto adds a smaller, later-night venue. Tierra Santa Healing House, the hotel's 12,000-square-foot spa with a hammam, eleven treatment rooms and an infrared sauna, was slated to open in the months following the hotel rather than on opening day. A dedicated Faena Theatre for live performance is planned for spring 2026.