Designer Pamela Hughes brought a wealth of imagination and a world of dreams to The Cloister. And it shows.

“We want guests who have been coming for generations to feel comfortable and to feel that it’s still their Cloister. We didn’t change it all. It’s still there, just better.”

What have you done in the Cloister for children?

We’ve got this fabulous settee from the Parisian flea markets, and we put all the Cloister kids’ photos there — photos of children from the past and kids with families. So we’re hoping that parents will say to their children, I’m going to meet you at seven o’clock by the benches or the settee. We’d like it to be a gathering place for the children. In addition, the Library has books for the whole family. We also have tables with puzzles and games. And everywhere, there are places where families can sit and be together. Like a big home.

How did you give The Cloister that residential feel?

We have seating groups; people can sit down in twos or fours. Even though it’s a grand scale in many of the rooms, we have small areas where people can talk to one another and have tea or a cocktail. There are, of course, some large spaces in the building, but we worked hard to create vignettes for people to feel comfortable, as comfortable as they would in their own house.

What other touches give the hotel that sense of home?

There is no shiny marble. Everything has a patina. All the fabrics have a residential feel. Most of the furniture is custom-designed, so people never will have seen these things before. The idea was for somebody to walk into this beautiful building and say, “This must be where the Jones family has lived for the last four generations.”