HotelChatter

Highlights: The great location in Back Bay “on the kind of serene, flower-filled street we’d like to live on permanently.” The airy third-floor suite that was a lot more appealing “than the Westin and Sheraton boxes” where the writer has logged nights. The gas fireplaces in select rooms, and sleek kitchenettes in all.

Lowlights: The dungeon—“Room 100, a dark basement chamber with a desk jutting into its center,” the lack of ergonomic chairs and bathtubs, showers with “water pressure that only Al Gore could love.” Outside, there’s no awning to cover people struggling with the front-door keypad (the radical experiment means no room keys), and in place of “room service,” there’s a basement lounge offering a “grim assortment of plastic-wrapped Sara Lee muffins (they’ve since been replaced with bagels and English muffins) and little tubs of applesauce, the kind that toddlers eat for lunch.”

When the lounge was locked at 6:30 a.m. one morning, the Times discovered that their in-room coffee maker was missing. (See: "radical experiment, etc")

Bottom line: “The best thing about the hotel is that it’s not hotel-y.” Also? Everything the review whines about are the things that make the hotel not hotel-y. Rooms start at $149 a night for a studio.

[Photo: Jodi Hilton for The New York Times]