The Nora Hotel marked its official opening on Thursday night with synchronized swimmers in the rooftop pool and a swan drifting through the party. The 201-room hotel has been taking guests since October 19. It just waited until now to make an entrance.
Guests have actually been sleeping here since October 19. Thursday was the formal debut, swan and all, and it suited the place. The swimmers were synchronized. The swan was not. It anchors the Nora District, a rail-yard rework just north of downtown, and it opened like it meant it.
The New York team behind it
The Nora comes from Sean MacPherson, Ira Drukier and Richard Born, the hoteliers behind Hotel Chelsea, The Bowery Hotel and The Mercer in New York. Manhattan institutions, all three, and this is the team’s first South Florida property.
The Mercer sits in SoHo, The Bowery on the Bowery, Hotel Chelsea on West 23rd Street, and BD Hotels, the team’s company, runs the same play at each of them: characterful rooms, serious restaurants, lobbies that become neighborhood fixtures. The Nora applies the recipe at 201 rooms. It is also a bet on West Palm Beach itself, a city collecting New York names at speed.
Manhattan, relocated to a Florida rail yard, cobblestones and all.
Christine and John Gachot designed the interiors, mixing Palm Beach romance with the moodier rooms the team is known for downtown.
The lobby sets the tone: dark wood paneling, a checkerboard marble floor and a wall of room keys behind the desk. The three have form for this, and the Gachot layering does the rest, patterned textiles over pale walls. Nothing in the public rooms shouts for attention.
Dinner is Pastis, drinks are on the roof
Pastis is the headliner restaurant, Stephen Starr’s Parisian brasserie doing classic bistro fare by way of New York. It gets the big tiled room, the bentwood chairs and a vintage Pastis poster on the wall. Pastis has form in New York, where the brasserie name carries its own waiting list, and here it anchors the ground floor.
Jack’s Bar handles the drinks, styled after the neighborhood’s old glamour and industrial grit, all dark wood, low light and a grand piano in the corner. Pastis Privé, tucked alongside the restaurant, takes the private parties and the smaller celebrations.
Up top sits Lillys, the rooftop from Mama Hospitality. The crew behind Mary Lou’s runs it.
Lillys Pool handles cabanas and poolside dining. Bar Lilly pours aperitifs and sunset cocktails. Cafe Lilly serves the full dinner, with the food program run by STARR Restaurants.
The split lets the roof work all day. Cafe hours to sunset cocktails, one deck.
Live music, performances and collaborations with fashion and art are on the plan for the roof. Between the brasserie, the bar and the roof, the hotel can feed and water a guest for a whole weekend without one reservation outside its own walls.
Rooms with actual sunlight
The hotel describes its rooms as spacious, sunlit and richly layered, with generous bathrooms, and the photos back the sunlit part. Tall balcony doors, pale walls, a deep green rug and a bed made up like a magazine shoot.
The palette stays calm on purpose: cream, cane, deep green, warm wood, with tall balcony doors pulling the Florida light deep into the room, all the way to the bed. After the rooftop, calm is the right gear. The generous bathrooms run the same quiet palette.
The Sisley Spa is Florida’s first, built on the Paris brand’s botanical approach to beauty and wellbeing.
Sisley built its name on plant-based formulas in Paris, and the treatments here follow the botanical luxury the house is known for. This is the brand’s first Florida address.
Two hundred and one rooms also means weddings and events, handled in-house.
A rail yard grew up
You will find it at 1135 North Railroad Avenue, anchoring the Nora District, where century-old railway warehouses are being reworked into restaurants, shops and gathering places along a cobblestone street, just north of downtown. Railroad Avenue was a working rail address long before it was a hotel one.
Around it, the warehouses are filling with dining and shopping, turning a rail yard into the neighborhood the hotel is named for, in a district built from the city’s rail history rather than its beachfront.
The warehouses give the block its bones, and the hotel gives it a front desk.
The hotel sells rooms through its own site, where the booking engine carries live rates by date, so book it for a Palm Beach weekend that runs on dinner reservations and rooftop hours instead of beach chairs. The Nora is a city hotel wearing resort clothes. The fit is good.