Growing Up Can Be Cool

This month's reopening of W New York–Union Square marks the culmination of a global makeover that aims to move the iconic brand beyond its hard-partying youth. Todd Plummer checks in

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IN THE CENTRAL ATRIUM of the W Budapest, sounds reverberate gently: footsteps on marble, clinking glasses, the pulse of lounge music. Low-slung velvet furniture punctuates the cavernous space. An enormous glass ceiling contains the hum of energy to the ground level, keeping it from drifting through the cathedral-like stone archways into the guests-only hallways upstairs. The hotel's Living Room is a suave, civilized space inside the city's Drechsler Palace, a Belle Époque beauty that has had former lives as a ballet institute, a brothel (allegedly), and the longtime home of the famed Cafe Reitter.

The building's latest turn, as the city's two-year-old W Hotel, exemplifies one of hospitality's most striking reinventions in recent memory: the metamorphosis of W Hotels from the preeminent late-night hang of the aughts into a more grownup hotel group that has matured alongside its guests. The Living Room itself has been updated from the nightclub that defined the “models and bottles” ethos when it debuted more than 25 years ago at the original W on Lexington Avenue. When the W New York-Union Square officially reopens this September, it will mark a milestone in a transformation that began nearly a decade ago, affecting nearly 20,000 rooms across 70 hotels in 32 countries. By 2028, 80 percent of W Hotels' existing portfolio will have been updated; there will also be new openings from Sardinia to Riyadh.

Think of the difference between the old W Hotels and the new as being akin to the difference between Sex and the City and And Just Like That...: one story, two stages of life. Fittingly, W Hotels and SATC both debuted in 1998, about six months apart. As George Fleck, the senior vice president and global brand leader of St. Regis, Edition, and W Hotels, puts it: "When you watch Sex and the City from the early 2000s, the humor and naughtiness is very different from today."