The St. Regis New York Restores King Cole Bar's Original Tiffany Windows for Its 120th Year

The St. Regis New York, the hotel that started the brand when John Jacob Astor IV opened it on Fifth Avenue in 1904, marked its 120th anniversary in 2024 with a roughly $100 million renovation of its public spaces, led by Champalimaud Design. The scale of the project matched the significance of the milestone, touching some of the most historically loaded rooms in American hotel history.

The King Cole Bar, birthplace of the Bloody Mary under its original name the Red Snapper, was refreshed with dark wood paneling, a deep green ceiling, scalloped banquettes, and lavender tasseled chairs, all while preserving the original 1906 oak bar and Maxfield Parrish's Old King Cole mural above it. During the renovation, workers rediscovered original 1905-era stained-glass windows based on a Tiffany design, hidden for decades behind the front desk, and restored them to public view.

Uncovering genuine, previously hidden Tiffany-era glasswork during a renovation is the kind of discovery that can't be manufactured, and it gave the hotel's 120th anniversary a physical piece of its own history to unveil rather than simply commemorate. For the birthplace of both the St. Regis brand and butler service as a hotel amenity, the timing felt exactly right.

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