Two great hotels in Manhattan reopened this summer, and both splashed out millions to remake themselves. Say hello—again—to Mark and Pierre. Well, The Mark and The Pierre.

The first time I checked into The Mark years ago, I thought it was the coolest hotel in the world. Before the phrase “boutique hotels” was on everyone’s lips, The Mark was a discreet hideaway on Madison and 77th with a tiny bar barely big enough to hold 15 people tucked off its lobby. A sophisticated restaurant was opposite the 77th Street entrance, and soon that will re-open with celeb chef Jean-George Vongerichten running things.

This was and still is a hotel for getaways, not conventions or tedious business meetings.

The lobby in the cozy hotel was small enough that celebrities could scoot across unseen. The rooms were modern, mostly white and gray, as I recall. Great towels and sheets, upscale bathroom amenities and a general manager named Raymond Bickson—who never met a request he couldn’t meet—ran the place like a private club.

The Mark is back, still with black and white as its primary colors. In fact, from the moment you step into the same small lobby, the white marble floors with black accents are nearly blinding. In a good way. One of France’s premier interior decorators, Jacques Grange, and his partner, art dealer Pierre Passebon, have remade the place so it’s just familiar enough to remind former guests of its earlier, brilliant career but new enough to place The Mark at the forefront of great New York City hotels.

Lobby Living Room at The Mark

I only stayed a hurried night recently, so I didn’t get to make much use of the Bang & Olufsen flat-screen television (said to be the first such installation in a hotel) or the terrific walk-in shower with great water pressure and a choice of fixed shower head or hand-held unit. The 118 hotel rooms are paired with 42 co-op apartments that can be available for rent if buyers choose to add them to the hotel rental pool. Those in the rental pool will be subject to the same fashionable design as the hotel rooms. Oh, and you can buy the penthouse if you have $50 million. (Room rates, on the other hand, begin north of $500 a night.)

The Mark Suite Master Bedroom

(One great plus to The Mark’s location: Eli Zabar’s E.A.T. is just a few blocks north on Madison—great for breakfast.)

My review of The Pierre is brief because I didn’t have the time to visit the hotel’s renovated rooms. Like The Mark, The Pierre spent in excess of $100 million renovating the place, but good news: The elevators are still manned by elevator operators, which was my most vivid memory when I first checked into The Pierre years ago.

Meeting Room at The Pierre

I met my friend Claudia from The Leading Hotels of the World for breakfast just before my sedan service was going to pick me up to take me to JFK for a flight home.

“Are you coming to The Pierre’s opening dinner party tonight?” she asked.

Being based in Minnesota means I sometimes miss out on those kinds of invitations, and I told her I didn’t even know it was happening. With a phone call, Claudia took care of that, and I cancelled my airport ride.

Pierre Bedroom

(Full disclosure as encouraged by the FTC recently: Both hotels are members of The Leading Hotels of the World, which was a major underwriter of my most recent series of public television travel shows, Rudy Maxa’s World. My dinner at The Pierre that night and room at The Mark were comped, but trust me, I’d write as effusively about both if I’d had to proffer my American Express card.)

The common thread between The Mark and The Pierre is The Mark’s former general manager, the aforementioned Raymond Bickson. Today he’s the CEO of Taj Hotels, based in Mumbai, the new owner of The Pierre (as well as the former Ritz-Carlton in Boston, now called the Taj Boston, and the Campton Place in San Francisco). Bickson is a hotelier’s hotelier, and it showed on opening night.

Guests were serenaded up the steps of the 61st Street entrance to The Pierre by a small army of violinists, and inside Bickson held court at a lavish cocktail party as movie stars, hotel executives, travel-agent-to-the-stars Bill Fisher and wretched travel journalists like me nibbled on lobster and swilled champagne. A lavish production of Indian dancers preceded dinner in the hotel’s opulent ballroom, and the rack of lamb that arrived before me was the biggest, rarest rack of lamb I’ve ever seen.

I tried to forget my next dinner would be in my own modest quarters in St. Paul, Minnesota. Instead, I set my cap for a serious return visit to see both Mark and Pierre for a longer time.