Asbury Ocean Club ★★★★★

Fifty-Four Rooms, Four Floors Above the Boardwalk

Handel Architects describe the building as an homage to the beach house: simple materials, open, light and airy, wrapped into a seventeen-story tower that curves to follow the shoreline. A thin curtain of folded metal sheathes the ground floor, angled to catch the light and screen what sits behind it. The hotel itself occupies one floor, the fourth, with 54 rooms and suites ringed by a planted sand-dune garden, and residences stacked above. The effect is strange and rather clever: a resort laid out horizontally, lifted clear of the retail below, with the Atlantic straight ahead.

Why It Works

We kept this address because it refuses the two obvious scripts for the Jersey Shore. It is neither a nostalgia act nor a generic beach tower. Anda Andrei, working with Bonetti/Kozerski, built the interiors on gem tones, rich greens and pinks, when every instinct at this address would have said blue and white. The references she names are Anguilla, Spain and Portugal rather than the boardwalk. Add a house with only 54 keys and a single guest floor, and the arithmetic favors you: the pool is not a stadium, the staff learn your name, and the whole thing behaves like a private club that happens to take bookings.

Why This Location

Ocean Avenue at Kingsley is the hinge of modern Asbury Park. The boardwalk and the beach are immediately east, and the town’s music venues, restaurants and record shops run west and north from the corner, so the whole place is walkable from the door. Retail lines the base of the building itself. This is a town that rebuilt itself around its music history rather than around resorts, which is why a weekend here reads differently from one further down the shore. New York and Philadelphia are both within a comfortable drive, and the train makes the city trip feasible without a car.

Fast Facts

• Price: Luxury

• Vibe: gem-toned, low-slung, quietly glamorous

• Rooms: 54 rooms and suites, all on the fourth floor, wrapped by a dune garden

• Best For: design-minded weekends, couples, anyone who wants the shore without the crowds of a big resort

• Our Favorite Thing About the Hotel: the fifty-five-foot nautical sofa on the pool terrace, which is exactly as unreasonable as it sounds

• Dining: the Drawing Room, with communal tables, an open kitchen and a piano bar; a pool bar and grill on the terrace; a bespoke gin made with Asbury Park Distilling Co.

• Amenities: a 65 by 30 foot ocean-facing pool on an ipe deck, teak loungers, dune garden, fitness, indoor and outdoor drawing room

• Attractions: the Asbury Park boardwalk and beach, the town’s music venues and restaurants, the shops along Cookman Avenue

The Drawing Room and the Piano

The Drawing Room is the heart of the hotel rather than a restaurant bolted onto it. It runs indoors and out, opening west onto a garden of beach grass and east toward the water, with communal tables, an open kitchen and a piano bar. The register is closer to a well-run house than to hotel dining, which is the point: you eat where you have been sitting all afternoon. Local partnerships run through the drinks list, including a gin made for the house by Asbury Park Distilling Co.

A Pool Deck Built Like a Ship

The terrace is the property’s best room and it is outdoors. A pool of sixty-five by thirty feet sits above the ocean on ipe decking, with teak loungers and a fifty-five-foot nautical sofa curved along one edge. A full-service pool bar and grill means the afternoon need not be interrupted. Handmade olive-green ceramic tile, fumed oak floors and hand-painted florals carry the same hand indoors, so the deck and the rooms read as one idea rather than two.

What to Know Before You Book

Check-in runs from four in the afternoon and check-out is at eleven. Fifty-four rooms on a single floor means the good ones go early, so book ahead for summer weekends and ask about the outlook when you do. The shore has a strong season, and the character of the town changes with it: high summer is busy and loud in the best way, while spring and fall hand the boardwalk back to the locals. Children are accepted, though the atmosphere skews adult.