To call TWA JFK a luxury hotel would be an insult – it’s pure genius

“But, it’s newer on the inside than on the outside!” Dr Who fans will get the riff on the Tardis – the Doctor’s blue police box time machine, being bigger on the outside… Yeah, yeah, yeah, every new Who-helper makes the idiot observation on stepping inside and goggling.

Enter the elevator in Jet Blue’s Terminal 5, JFK airport, New York, to reach the recently opened TWA Hotel. The boutique overnighter has at its core the refurbished TWA terminal, bespoke built for “the most exciting airline in the world” in 1962, abandoned in 2001. Guests are faced with an unusual button choice: Level 1: The Future – Jet Blue Terminal 5; or, Level 2: The Past – TWA Hotel. This elevator is a statement, a harbinger of many statements in store – a time portal to the big-finned, bee-hive hairdo-ed, Bakelite-gadgeted America of Mad Men 1960s.

JFK, New York’s biggest airport, doesn’t really do airport hotels. Until now they were all off site. I quite like airport hotels. They are efficient stopovers; everything is to hand, and they buzz with well-honed efficiency. Sometimes they are quirky, like Yotel’s minimalist cubicles, where much amusement is to be had trying to turn around. But that’s the point. Purposeful. Minimal.

TWA Hotel, JFK, is a class apart. The central structure is a sweeping sculpture heralding the dawn of global travel, conceived by Finnish architect Eero Sarinnen, who sadly predeceased his creation’s opening by twelve months. Now overwhelmed by larger, functional terminal buildings and the JFK Skytrain, it seems to have landed outside its successor – Terminal 5 – to lure guests back to air travel’s very own Jurassic Park.

It is a flowing confection in pre-stressed concrete, not a straight line in sight. As the assistant manager, a delightful lady kitted out in period TWA stewardess kit – who uncompromisingly wrestled my 50lb suitcase from me, (seemed dangerous to refuse) – told me en-route to my room in the Howard Hughes Wing, “There ain’t a 90 degree angle anywhere in the whole building.” Howard Hughes, the quirky US magnate, owned TWA back in the day.

Who owns the hotel now? Maybe Howard Hughes? “That’s Tyler Morse”, said Miss TWA. “You just passed him in the corridor. It’s his baby. He’s always here, making sure every detail is correct.”

Mr Morse is CEO of MCR hotels, a chain of 119 properties operating globally under fourteen brands. What’s the market niche? To call TWA JFK a luxury hotel would be an insult. Thematic won’t cut it either. For, the meticulous attention to period detail in every aspect of the interior design, coupled with ultra-modern facilities, is little short of pure genius. You are privileged to be checking into, and sharing, a hotel owner’s obsession.

Walk this way; along a red-carpeted, softly lit, white ovoid corridor – a connecting tube in a Dan Dare space ship – down to reception, featuring modern self-service check-in points, aping airline counters, bristling with intuitive high-end technology, but signed with period oval pearlescent, warm white lights, sporting Check In, picked out in distinct black lettering.

The centre piece is straight from Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 fantasy sci-fi film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, backed by a huge – ovoid again – Arrivals/Departures board. Clearly, it’s hopelessly out of date. It is legible. Quaint. Featuring large white script contrasting against a black background, it is easy to read from a distance. Quite unlike its state of the art, micro-type sibling in the terminal, text presented in indistinguishable, pastel colours, with an annoying knack of scrolling to another page just when you have spotted your flight, but before you have found the Gate number. This stark creature looms above a peak-cap, uniformed receptionist, like a Mars monster from H G Wells’ War of the Worlds.

Whoa! What’s that outside? My flight to LA? Hope not. Because glinting through the window is a pristine Lockheed Constellation Starliner, vintage 1958, lovingly restored as an aircraft – but pragmatically used as a bar. Attention to detail has been ridiculous. Insane. The period plaid seats even feature safety-belts. In a plane going nowhere? Buckle up for that Moscow Mule and a bumpy ride. The cockpit is fully equipped with flight controls; genuine articles scavenged from parts bins and dumps across the USA. Reassuringly, they don’t actually work.

The restoration work was carried out by Atlantic Models and GoGo Aviation. The livery is original TWA. I was relieved to learn that the plane actually arrived by road, including a triumphal passage through New York’s Times Square. It is worth staying at the hotel just for a drink at the bar.

In 1984, on our first trip to Faro airport in Portugal’s Algarve, my wife and I were astonished to find there was no real airport. A gaggle of buildings, yes, but international check-in queues were formed outside temporary tourist season gazebos, erected alongside the rudimentary terminal.

And, there was a Lockheed Constellation Starliner, converted to a bar. Maybe Mr Morse pinched the idea. When Faro airport became boringly conventional, the former TAP Starliner could be seen, unceremoniously dumped in a field, somewhere along the coast. The Connie mouldered for years, before being destroyed by fire in 1999. An ignominious ending for the most graceful lady of the skies.

Or was it? Could this be … ? Nope. This TWA specimen was downgraded to bush work in Alaska in 1962. The Boeing 707, 300MPH faster and carrying 132 more passengers, had done for the Connie. When TWA retired its Starliner passengers were given a leaflet on the last flight – Props Are for Boats. A bit ungrateful to the old girl. She was then sold at auction in 1979 for $150, restored, used as a marijuana mule in Colombia, abandoned in Honduras, scavenged for parts for another restoration project, then found and lovingly restored by Morse in an amazingly short six months in 2018.

Facilities at the TWA hotel JFK are of a far higher standard than the norm. Hungry? There’s the Paris Café by Jean-Georges, themed by Jean-Georges Vongerichten America’s go-to, fancy chef du jour; actually, du décienne; well, really, de plus du trois déciennes. Not as long ago as TWA, though.

Or, for lighter fare, perhaps simply booze, try The Sunken Lounge, The Rooftop Pool, grab a sandwich at the Food Hall, or fire up the neurons at The Intelligentsia Café.

Rooms are – of course – modern, cutting edge stylish and practical, but they nod to the past. Excellent workspace, sufficient stowage and lots of power points. Again, the TWA theme and logo are everywhere. Soap packet, notepad – I stole 10 sheets, and the soap – a Life magazine from 1962 with Alan Shepard, America’s first man in space, grinning out from the cover. It looked sufficiently thumbed to be the original article. Great touch.

I gazed out of the window, soaking in the outline of the pure white building against the darkening evening sky, turned round and – there it was. How could I have missed it? The pièce de résistance; the grand bouquet; the bees’ knees. A simple, shiny-black, Bakelite dial-telephone on a white table. It positively oozed period defiance, My spanking new iPhone 11 quivered before it. Respect.

I was disappointed there was no operator. No plug-in switchboard at the end of the wire. I tried speaking to it. It remained reassuringly mute. It was from the days when telephones were servants, not bossy masters.

I recalled, in 1998, our younger son rootling in a box of outmoded technology, fishing out a dial telephone, and asking what it was. Techno-redundancy in full swing. Disarmingly, unlike its modern digital, wireless-enabled Bluetooth successors which come with an Encyclopaedia Britannica of incomprehensible instructions, this Bakelite beauty came with – nothing. Work it out.

TWA launched its top of the line Jetstream fleet in 1958. Super luxury, sporting custom murals, the Starlight Lounge with golden banquettes for cocktail slurping, star-gazing and canape chomping, turned a noisy, vibrating airliner into the Oriental Express of the skies. TWA hotel brings all that yesteryear hoopla to earth today.

Tyler Morse has not built a hotel, he has created a destination in its own right. There may no longer be romance in cramped flying at 40,0000 feet, so, here’s some magic to enjoy on the journey, even if it’s at ground level. I could have stayed for a week.