What an apparthotel actually is
An apparthotel is a hotel where the room is laid out like an apartment: a full kitchen, a living room with a sofa, and a bedroom with a door that closes. You still get the hotel parts, a front desk, housekeeping, someone to call when the thermostat is confusing. The spelling moves around (apparthotel, apart-hotel, aparthotel, apartment hotel) and it all points at the same thing.
That's the definition. What follows is the part the floor plans don't tell you: how a kitchen and a sofa change the shape of a week in New York.
The first thing that changes is breakfast
Breakfast is where most people feel the difference on day one. In a standard room, the day starts with a decision: pay for a hotel breakfast, or walk out and find something. With a kitchen you can put the kettle on in your pyjamas and let the kids eat cereal at 6:30 while you shower.
We don't include breakfast at 17John. There's coffee in the lounge if you just need a cup before you go, and after that the Financial District has plenty of good options a few minutes' walk away. But most of our longer-stay guests end up buying eggs, milk and fruit on the first afternoon and eating in most mornings. It's cheaper and it's faster, and on a trip with small children it removes the worst hour of the day.
You'll shop for groceries, which sounds boring and isn't
Stocking a kitchen is the thing that makes a trip feel less like a trip. Buying bread on your first evening, keeping leftovers in a full-size fridge, cooking one real dinner in the middle of a week of restaurant meals. We keep a list of where to actually buy groceries down here, because the Financial District isn't laid out like a residential neighbourhood and the good options aren't always the obvious ones.
If you're staying a week or more, this is the single biggest cost difference between an apparthotel and a regular room. Two meals a day out for a family of four adds up faster than the room rate does.
Laundry, mid-trip
Longer stays fall apart on laundry. Ten days in a standard room means either a suitcase of dirty clothes or a hotel laundry bill that quietly doubles your incidentals. We have a laundry room on site, which means you can pack for five days and stay for two weeks. Pack light, wash on day six. It's a small thing that changes what you bring.
Room to work, and somewhere to sit that isn't the bed
If you're here for work, the living room is the point. You can take a call at the table while someone else sleeps, spread papers out, and not spend your evening perched on the end of a mattress. We also have a conference room in the building if you need somewhere with a door for a longer meeting, plus a gym and a guest lounge on the lower level and a rooftop terrace with lounge chairs, which is a good place to end the day when the offices empty out.
You pay by the suite, not by the head
This is the part people ask us about most. We don't charge per guest. We sell the room, so a suite that sleeps five costs the same whether three people or five are in it, as long as everyone fits the layout. If you want to add an adult and two kids to a booking you already made, that's usually fine, we just need to know so we can match the party to a layout that actually works.
For bigger groups we have two and three bedroom suites. A three bedroom handles a party of five comfortably, and a two bedroom with a sofa bed works for five too. We don't have connecting rooms, which surprises people, so if you're a group who wants to be near each other the answer isn't two rooms with a door between them, it's one suite with real bedrooms. If you'd rather have separate suites, we can book them together and we'll do our best to put you on the same floor as your check-in date gets closer.
When an apparthotel isn't worth it
Honest answer: if you're in town for two nights, eating out every meal, and back at the room only to sleep, a standard room does the job and you won't use the kitchen. The maths turns around somewhere around night four, or the moment there are more than two of you, or the moment someone in the group needs to keep working while everyone else is on holiday.
Why the Financial District suits this kind of stay
Downtown is quiet in the evenings and quieter on weekends, because most of the people here on a Tuesday go home on Friday. That's a drawback if you want a busy street outside your door at midnight and a real advantage if you're travelling with kids, working odd hours, or staying long enough that you'd like the neighbourhood to feel like a neighbourhood. You're walking distance from the Seaport, the 9/11 Memorial and the Brooklyn Bridge, and the subway lines that run through Fulton Street get you almost anywhere in Manhattan without changing trains.
Stay long enough with a kitchen and a laundry room and you stop thinking of it as a hotel stay. That's the whole idea.