Before Robert De Niro, TriBeCa was a former produce market district of cast-iron warehouses and loading docks. In the 1980s, he began the neighborhood's transformation — restaurants, the Tribeca Film Center, the Tribeca Film Festival, a block-by-block recomposition of downtown Manhattan's southern tip into one of the city's most coveted addresses. The Greenwich Hotel is the culmination of that project. Not the loudest piece — De Niro has never been interested in noise for its own sake — but the most considered. A corner building in hand-moulded red brick, designed to look as though it has always been there. Inside, three years of construction. Artisans sourced from four continents. Tibetan silk rugs, Moroccan tilework, Carrara marble, Russian white oak floors, Serge Mouille lighting, Beaumont & Fletcher leather wingbacks. Eighty-eight rooms, each one different from every other.

The lobby holds paintings by Robert De Niro Senior — the actor's father, a painter of the Abstract Expressionist generation whose work was exhibited alongside that of Willem de Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg. They hang without explanation. Guests who know, know. Guests who don't know will ask. Either way, the conversation begins.

Eighty-eight rooms and suites, each individually designed. The principle is not variety for its own sake but the conviction that every room in a serious hotel should feel like a place someone actually thought about. Moroccan hand-laid tiles in some bathrooms; Italian Carrara marble in others. Hand-loomed Tibetan silk rugs throughout. Savoir No. 4 beds — among the finest sleeping surfaces in the English-speaking world — in every room. Duxiana in the suites. Bose Bluetooth speakers. 1950s walnut desks alongside George Smith armchairs. The minibar is complimentary. The New York Times arrives at the door each morning. Some suites have working fireplaces. Some have private saunas. None repeat.

Below ground, the Shibui Spa is the most unexpected space in New York luxury hospitality. An 18th-century bamboo and pine farmhouse — transported in its entirety from Kyoto, reassembled without a single nail or screw by thirteen specialist craftsmen — now forms the ceiling and structure of the spa's main room. Beneath it: a lantern-lit swimming pool, low sofas, hemlock floors, the scent of jasmine freshly pounded for each treatment. Five treatment rooms. A shiatsu room. A traditional Japanese bathing room with a deep soaking tub. A wet room for wraps and scrubs. A 1,000-square-foot fitness center with old hemlock floors and hidden lighting. The spa is open to hotel guests only. It is the best reason to leave the room — and the best reason to return.

The Drawing Room opens off the lobby — a fireplace, French leather smoking chairs, original artworks from the De Niro collection, windows overlooking the courtyard garden. It is reserved for guests. No events. No outside access. The courtyard beyond it is similarly private: red brick, potted palms, wicker and wrought iron, a space designed to read as though it has been in place for decades. During the Tribeca Film Festival each spring, the hotel becomes the social center of one of New York's most significant cultural events — screenings at the neighboring Film Center, dinners at Locanda Verde, late evenings in the Drawing Room. The week has a tempo unlike any other week in the city.