There is a coffee lounge on the second floor of the W hotel at Union Square that is, technically, for guests only. Your correspondent has not yet been asked to leave.

The W is at 201 Park Avenue South, the building in which the Guardian Life Insurance Company put up its headquarters in 1911. The hotel took it over in the late nineties. The lobby at street level is what one would expect — busy, transactional, people checking in. One does not sit there.

The Living Room is on the second floor. The W chain calls them “Living Rooms” everywhere, and they are designed to function as each hotel's de facto lobby. The actual lobby below is for transactions; the Living Room above is for being. No front desk. No concierge. No obvious gatekeeping. A coffee bar in the back. Couches arranged in conversation groups. A fireplace.

The wifi works without a room key.

That sentence is the load-bearing one and merits a second iteration: the wifi works without a room key. Three trials, three confirmations. One connects to the network, the captive portal appears, and there is no field for guest authentication. One is online.

Your correspondent stumbled into the room one Wednesday morning, the way the best Manhattan rooms are usually found: by accident, on the way somewhere else. The intention had been the breakfast menu downstairs. Then one noticed the staircase. The bartender on the second floor said good morning and asked nothing. Two hours of work followed at the corner table.

What matters more than the room itself is the second-floor pattern. There is a class of Manhattan hotels — perhaps ten — where the genuinely sittable space is one flight above the street. The Ned NoMad is upstairs. The Greenwich Hotel's drawing room is one floor up. The Beekman has it. The pattern is consistent enough that your correspondent now checks the second floor of every hotel encountered on foot.

The reason it works, one suspects, is that hotels designed in the last twenty years have understood that the ground floor must be operationally efficient — bell desk, front desk, dinner-rush bar. The Living Room above is a feature for the guests, but the hotel does not police it, because the marginal cost of you sitting on a couch is zero, and an empty lounge reads worse than a full one.

So the deal, again, is implicit. One walks up. One sits. One orders a coffee, perhaps, after a while, if so moved. One stays as long as one likes. Nobody asks.