The Langham, New York, Fifth Avenue in New York City has rolled out newly redesigned terrace rooms and suites on the property's fifth and 11th floors.
Designed and landscaped by Blondie’s Treehouse, a New York-based landscape design and horticultural company, each terrace can be used as a private add-on to its assigned guestroom or joined together to create a larger communal terrace for small groups staying together or for private events. The private patios are attached to three guestrooms on the fifth floor as well as one junior suite and two guestrooms on the 11th floor.
The fifth-floor terraces are walled-in private enclaves with teal furnishings, including a couch, two armchairs, a coffee table and two wicker ottomans on each terrace. The terrace is divided by hand-crafted wooden walls covered with faux English ivy, accented with large evergreen shrubs of chamaecyparis obtusa, otherwise known as “false cypress.” A large rhododendron maximum, also known as “great laurel,” takes up the back corner as a green anchor for the entire space, along with English ivy, which will progressively continue to grow up the back wall.
The 11th-floor terraces overlook Fifth Avenue. Each terrace is decorated in shades of coral with a couch, two armchairs, a coffee table, and a high-boy table with two barstools. To separate each terrace, Blondie’s designed moveable wood lattice dividers covered with fargesia rufa, a noninvasive bamboo, to create a sense of privacy thanks to its dense, bright leaves. Small low bowls of carex, a grass-like plant, and moss add touches of green along with a wall of English ivy at the northern end.
The terraces are sold as an upgrade to each of the rooms to which they are connected.
The connection to the outdoors continues downstairs, where the (indoor) Chuan Spa incorporates natural elements that Amy Chan, group therapy spa manager for Chuan Spas, said provide an environment of physical well-being. The spa’s lobby has a waterfall (the word “chuan” means “flowing water”), so that guests sitting in the waiting room can listen to real sounds of nature. The saunas in both the men’s and women’s sections of the spa, meanwhile, include natural cedar seating and portions of the walls are made of pink Himalayan salt bricks. The wall, Chan said, incorporates the “incredibly healing powers” of salt into the sauna experience.
Photo credit: Michael Weber