Last week, designer Philippe Starck got a glimpse of the new Royalton hotel lobby (above), the $17.5 million Roman and Williams redesign of his beloved original, according to The New York Daily News. He was not impressed. According to NYDN's Ben Widdicombe:

Thursday night, after checking in under his own name, the designer and a pal did a 360-degree loop around the restaurant Brasserie 44. And he was visibly upset, says an eyewitness.

"He pointed various things out and gestured his dislike that they had changed," says our snitch. "He was like, 'Look what they did to my baby!'"

We can't say it any better than Alice Rawsthorn already did, when she wrote that the Morgans Hotel Group "has committed the woefully common corporate design crime of replacing something wonderful - the show-stopping lobby dreamt up in 1988 by the then enfant terrible of French post-modernism, Philippe Starck - with something that isn't."