HotelChatter

Highlights: Rooms have “fluffy pillows and duvets,” a flat-screen TV, a bright orange contemporary chair that lends a “needed dash of flash.” Room service is available 24-hours. The hotel houses the first Scandinavian branch of Manhattan resto Aquavit. The spa and fitness center proffer “handsome” cityscape views.

Lowlights: Standard rooms and bathrooms are particularly compact, a fact “underscored by the vastness of the glass-and-steel building in which it’s tucked.” A combo closet-and-dresser unit was an “impossibly slender caricature of space maximization.” And the stall shower sounds a little nerve-wracking, with a glass door that kept getting stuck shut (“the soggy person trapped inside occasionally had to rally the drier person outside to the cause of liberation,” writes Bruni). Minimal toiletries. The fitness center, while spiffy, costs 95 kronor (around $12) per day.

Bottom line: A few blocks from the high-speed airport train terminus and the business district, the hotel is decidedly business-minded, a fact echoed by “crisply efficient service” and a “bevy of international newspapers in the lobby.” Even so, “there’s just enough of what, in Scandinavia, passes for whimsy — check out the black toilet paper in the lobby bathroom — to liven things up,” concludes Bruni. Rates start around 1,500 kronor (roughly $187) but more often than not spike higher.

[Photo: Rob Schoenbaum for The New York Times]