As we prepared to depart after a three-night stay in the Aman New York, my wife commented that there was one thing (and only one) that she would miss about this grand hotel: the toilet.

She meant the fully electronic Toto toilet in the vault-like water closet of our room, with its warm seat and every bidet spray, flush intensity and other adjustment you could dream of in a toilet. It even opened up when you approached it. Unlike our room itself, whose door refused to unlock when presented with the key cards we’d been issued, even after I had them repeatedly re-issued at the reception desk up on the fourteenth floor. (Up, you ask? Yes, we’ll come back to that.)

The nonfunctional key cards were made of some sort of compressed wood, in a small gesture at environmental awareness that I suspect compromised their functionality as key cards. The same could be said of much of our experience of the Aman: design gestures great and small, which in their totality add up to less comfort and functionality than more conventional choices might have allowed.

We’d been wanting to visit the Aman New York since it opened in 2022. At the time, much was made in the press about the unusually large dimensions of the rooms, and the unusually large cost (even for luxury New York hotels) of getting one. This was to be the pinnacle of urban hotel luxury, with an aggressive modernity intended to leave the old-school comforts and pretensions of places like the nearby Plaza, Pierre, and Carlyle in the dust, and more exclusive to boot (83 “suites” in the Aman vs. 190 rooms in, say, the Carlyle).

We’d stayed at both the Carlyle and the Lowell in the preceding year, and while we appreciate the rich history of the former and love the intimate, European ambiance of the latter, we decided it was time to finally indulge our curiosity about the Aman, cost be damned. (And the cost is indeed damnable, ranging as it may upwards of four grand per night.)

We were, in a word, disappointed. Not because the staff wasn’t attentive, well-trained, and obsequious (they were). Not because the meals (breakfasts, in our case) weren’t perfectly fine (they were, though my coffee consistently arrived late). And not because we didn’t appreciate the enormous expense that had gone into fabricating an environment that seems utterly disconnected from the city outside its walls (we did). Rather, our disappointment was the result of design choices that seem intended to rather forcibly impress, but that result in a series of small inconveniences that undercut luxury.

Start with the overall structure of the hotel. You enter from 57th Street into a rather small, dark, austere reception space that’s more a buffer against the street than an actual lobby. From there you head, confusingly, to the top of the hotel on the fourteenth floor, where there is a spacious, high-ceilinged lounge, a bar, open air terraces (covered during our December visit), three restaurants, and conventional reception and concierge desks. The result of this arrangement is that all the rooms are below the lobby, you take the elevator down to your room, and then, when you want to exit the hotel, back up to the fourteenth floor to change elevator banks to go back down to street level.

Presumably this inversion of the normal topography of a hotel was chosen to insulate the common areas from the ceaseless hubbub of 57th Street and Fifth Avenue, and to provide some daylight and views to the common areas, but all the vertical to and fro of getting to your room and from your room to the street comes off as disorienting and time-consuming.

Then there’s the decor, starting with the lighting scheme. Let’s just say that if you don’t like darkness in your hotel design, you’re unlikely to like the Aman. Admittedly, we visited on three rainy, gray days in December, and perhaps a fraction more light would penetrate the place in spring or summer. But dimness is an intentional feature of the decor, both in the reception areas, and in the rooms. Downlights in the hallways cast timid pools of light every few feet. Dark browns and grays dominate the color palette, and are intended, no doubt, to convey a sense of serenity, but combined with the hard surfaces of concrete and marble that predominate, the place has the feeling of a very expensive, brutalist anteroom to a very exclusive hell.

That sounds harsh. In fairness, our “suite” was spacious and a bit less dim than the gloomy labyrinths we traversed to get to it. Lighting and other room functions (like temperature, window shades, and the electronic, glassed-in fireplace) are controlled from an iPad-like touchscreen by the bedside, meaning you need to be comfortable with a multi-layered computer interface if you want to accomplish what used to be done with, say, a wall switch. And it seemed that no amount of screen-punching could get our room up to a satisfactory level of brightness. A bit of daylight could enter from the two windows overlooking the street, but unless you’re ok with the folks shopping in Bergdorf’s across the way peering into your bedroom, you’re likely to keep the blackout shades fully drawn most of the time.

I put “suite” in quotes above because I’m an old-school adherent to the philosophy that a suite necessarily includes at least one more room than a bedroom and a bathroom. But I realize that modern hotel parlance deems the WC and perhaps the shower stall to qualify as “rooms,” hence any decently-scaled hotel room becomes a “suite.” Ours was quite spacious, with a small entry foyer, Japanese-influenced decor (bamboo elements, a big faux watercolor landscape mural) in a gold-tinged palette, and the aforementioned synthetic fireplace to lend some visual warmth.

Vertical ceiling-height pivoting louvres allow the bath area to be opened to the bedroom space, or closed off from it as you prefer. The floors are of dark brown herringbone stone, relieved in the bed area by a bamboo mat and by the provision of the customary bedroom slippers, but at these prices I thought that heated floors, particularly in the bathroom, wouldn’t have been too much to expect.

It’s in the bathroom that the Aman’s elevation of form over function finds its most forceful expression. Ceiling-height doors of stone and wood, weighing what must be hundreds of pounds, ponderously seal off the water closet and the shower, the latter a six-by-six-by-ten foot, dark brown stone room with separate push-button rain head and hand shower. Standing in the darkly-lit shower with its huge, heavy, windowless door closed feels like you’re bathing in a bank vault — impressive in a way, but also vaguely dystopian. Labels on the bath amenities are the same dark brown as the bottles and the walls, making them unreadable in the dim light.

Perhaps the perfect distillation of the Aman’s style statement is the faucet over each of the twin sinks in the sumptuously austere bathroom. Water spills from a flat metal fixture over the sink, but to turn it on or off or adjust the water temperature requires the manipulation of a thin metal joystick that protrudes horizontally from the left side of the fixture, requiring you to guess which direction is hot, cold, on or off. Eventually you figure it out, and begin to compensate for the fact that only your left hand can be used for this most basic of bathroom functions, but hey, you’re in the Aman, and absolutely nothing is going to be ordinary.

Oh, and bring earplugs. Our room was on the 9th floor overlooking 57th Street, and despite the extra-thick glass thoughtfully installed in the windows, the sounds of sirens and honking traffic penetrated the room at all hours of the day and night, making the heart-of-midtown location of the hotel not only an attraction, but a liability.

We won’t be rushing back. Those seeking to experience a rather heavy-handed haute design statement in near-total isolation from the city (truly, if you don’t look out a window, you could be anywhere) will find that the Aman New York more than fills the bill. But at this price point, a hotel experience should be very nearly flawless, and that’s not the reality of this particular Aman.