[imagesource: Drew Angerer/Getty Images]

On New York’s Park Avenue is the Waldorf Astoria, once the tallest and largest luxury hotel in the world.

The hotel has a long and storied history, opening its doors properly in 1931 and rising above the tide of the Great Depression to become one of the Big Apple’s most iconic hotels.

It has seen many famous faces – from Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra to US presidents like Herbert Hoover and Barack Obama – and history-making events over the years.

But that’s all in the past, 90 years of it, and right now the hotel is going through $1 billion renovations to bring it into the current century, reports CNN:

While parts of the hotel are being restored to its original state — rooms including the Grand Ballroom are protected by New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission — much of the building is being entirely reimagined for the future.

And, for the first time, the Waldorf Astoria will offer residential apartments to own, rather than lease, within the twin Waldorf Towers.

French designer Jean-Louis Deniot is in charge of transforming the new apartments and amenities and says he is going all out with a more “modernist” and “fresher” design:

“There’s something very peaceful and appealing about the sense of serenity of being connected with nature,” Deniot said.

Deniot also mentions how he wants things to be “timeless” but without relying on the past too much:

…”You don’t want to go too much back in time. There’s that sense of melancholia,” he said. “In the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, they all had great fun in there. The reason why the whole place was refurbished is to actually bring it to the next century.”

This includes the oasis-like Winter Garden bar and lounge, which will look something like this rendering below:

The amenities will be accessible only to residents, and will include the skylit 82-foot-long (25-metre) Starlight Pool, which was once the Starlight Roof where Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra performed:

Pierre-Yves Rochon is giving the hotel rooms an overhaul, of which there will be 375 (down from 1 400), plus 375 condominium units by the time the Waldorf Astoria reopens in 2023:

The apartments up for sale will be studios priced at $1,8 million (around R27 million), or a four-bedroom apartment starting at $18,5 million (R279 million).

There will also be two penthouses, the hotel’s crowned jewels, with prices currently undisclosed.

While all the renovations are more contemporary, some of the new spaces will still house famous objects from the past, including Porter’s 1907 Steinway piano, plus the hotel’s murals and mosaics.

Most impressive is probably the intricate 19th-century lobby clock, standing 2,7-metres tall, commissioned by Queen Victoria for the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago:

These renovations will be the hotel’s biggest makeover since it opened, transforming it into a new hotel basically.

In fact, there was actually another iteration of the hotel before 1931, established in 1893, built as two separate buildings:

[It was] “the results of a proverbial measuring contest between two moneyed cousins of the Astor family.

William Waldorf Astor, who became the richest man in America thanks to his father’s inheritance, built the Waldorf.

Four years later, his cousin, John Jacob Astor IV, doomed to become the wealthiest man to die aboard the Titanic in 1912, built a taller hotel right next door.

They eventually dropped the animosity and hyphenated the hotel’s name as well as the buildings, connecting the two through a 300-foot marble corridor dubbed “Peacock Alley.”

Among its perks, the Waldorf-Astoria touted that it was the first to offer en-suite bathrooms as well as room service.

Peacock Avenue (the image below is from the 1910s) was where fashionable guests showed off their evening outfits:

By the time Waldorf Astoria was on the map on Park Avenue, it was in news hands.

Having been acquired by someone new, the hotel entered into its prime and saw tons of famous faces walk through its halls and sleep in its rooms.

This included Elizabeth Taylor and Winston Churchill, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt (they had an apartment in The Towers over a decade ago), Sinatra and Monroe, as well as former President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his wife.

[source:cnn]