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Also this issue: Icepack |
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May 23-29, 2002
naked city
 Photo By: Scott Weiner |
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From its stately gray frontage, the Rittenhouse Square Bed & Breakfast is so completely unassuming, you wouldn’t even assume you could sleep there. The pretty, petite hotel -- now owned by developer Michael Yaron, the man working on a soon-coming Old City “W” type hotel -- feels so far removed from the big-head bustle of Rouge and Bleu that you understand why VIPs like Oprah stayed here during NBA All-Star weekend. Even ’N Sync couldn’t get a room on Stokowski Place’s finest four floors.
Transformed from traditional B&B to business-grade upscale within the first 10 months of purchase, the Rittenhouse B&B is gated without being guarded. Wrought-iron balconies and an imperial fenced-in semicircle of cobblestones greet a private front window that glows with light without revealing what's inside.
The 10-room mansion was built by architect Walter Cope in 1911. In its sleekly appointed foyer, one finds pink roses, brass candelabras and Monet-esque visuals surrounded by yellow-and-white English broad-stripe walls and black granite floors. Behind an Empire desk sits either hotel GM Harriet Seltzer (who hosts nightly wine receptions and provides guests with accoutrements from a DSL line to incall Pierre & Carlo spa service) or one of the concierges, who are on hand 24 hours a day. This front lobby -- with its pale-green/floral couches, brocaded fauteuil-style chairs, baby grand piano, grand silver pewter chess set and dimly lit chandeliers -- is oh so Noel Coward.
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The eight rooms (all very different) are elegant without being stuffy, weirdly and happily juxtaposed with Chippendale-inspired tables, Louis XVI-inspired chairs and taffeta valances. Room 307, uniquely, felt more severe with its Galerie Dada lampshades atop thin wrought-iron lamps, spare Mission tables and subtle leopard prints poking their way onto chairs and its still-life deco. (The Jacuzzi-filled bathrooms were so fluffy with Frette towels and Penhaligons toiletries that security had to usher me from the womb-ish inner sanctum). Mere feet from the loveliest rooms is an airy palazzolike marble Internet/computer station, sky-lit and birdcagey. Throughout, there are other eerie and nifty personal touches -- old books, vintage mirrors, Italian ceramics, neoclassical rugs -- that offer travelers sentimental comforts. It gave me the idea to increase my own daily sense of opulence. I'm building a sky-lit palazzo in my office right now. Swing that marble, boys, and keep those dirty boots out of my Jacuzzi!
Rittenhouse Square Bed & Breakfast, 1715 Rittenhouse Square, 215-546-6500, www.rittenhousebb.com.
