While the hotel’s Bemelmans Suite houses a private gallery of its own on the walls, you do not have to be a guest at Ocean House—where rooms start at $925—to see the hotel’s collection.
The gallery, which hangs in the hotel’s lower lobby, includes 21 illustrations from Bemelmans’ “Farewell to the Ritz,” article for Town & Country magazine, which he penned when the New York City hotel closed its doors in the early 1950s. Readers of his 1941 book Hotel Splendide will recognize the cheekily drawn characters in the illustrations. The gallery also boasts two original panels Bemelmans created for Aristotle Onassis’ yacht; murals created for La Colombe bistro in Paris; architectural commissions; drawings from product campaigns; and, of course, vibrant pages from the Madeline books, including two original paintings from Madeline and The Bad Hat, black and white drawings from Madeline and The Gypsies, and sketches from Madeline in London.
This hotel setting for this new gallery is only fitting. Dubbed “the original bad boy of the New York hotel scene” by Anthony Bourdain, Bemelmans was deeply influenced by his jobs in hotels—at institutions such as the Hotel McAlpin, Hotel Astor, and the Ritz—before becoming a full-time illustrator. He grew up in them—as a child traipsing through the halls of the Austrian hotel managed by his father, and as a young teenager apprenticing at a hotel managed by his uncle. Then, at 16, a young Bemelmans immigrated to the United States, where he found work in New York hospitality. It was his tenure at the Ritz—first as a busboy, and then assistant banquet manager—that most greatly influenced his illustrations.
The hilarity, antics, and the characters—both fellow hotel employees and guests alike—were immortalized in Hotel Splendide, the charming semi-fictionalized memoir re-released by Pushkin Press last year. The book traces Bemelmans’ escapades and triumphs at the Ritz (lightly disguised as the Splendide), from the behind-the-scenes underbelly of the hotel operations to the penthouse suites.
The new Bemelmans Suite at Ocean House is not unlike the suites at the Ritz where Bemelmans would once crash overnight. Yet at Ocean House, you can sleep alongside his legacy—something Bemelmans himself likely wouldn’t have imagined.
