(FORTUNE Small Business) – Good design is not a new idea, but it's an excellent one for our times, when money is spent to reflect taste and not merely the spender's capacity for extravagance. Unlike terms such as "luxury" or "fancy," "well-designed" manages to sound not just special but also virtuous. A "fancy" hotel room, for instance, might also be gauche and embarrassing. A "well-designed" hotel room, on the other hand, pays tribute to the aesthetic sense of its inhabitant--and thus is worth any price.

That idea, at least, seems to be guiding a segment of the hotel business these days. Recently I had occasion to spend a few days in Manhattan, where the hottest tickets in the hotel trade are all super-"designed." A classic example is the SoHo Grand (800-965-3000), which opened a few years ago. (A younger sibling, the TriBeCa Grand, lives one neighborhood away.) The SoHo aesthetic--sleek, silvery, clean, and dark--informs not just the Grand but most of the new designer hotels. My $259 room on the ninth floor, with a view of the World Trade Center, was spacious and quiet, and of course it looked fabulous. Significantly, all the rooms come with a handy price list, in case I wanted to, say, buy that plush robe ($100) or my own print of the room's William Klein photograph (matted but not framed, $2,000).

Perhaps the most interesting example of the designer hotel trend is the W chain (877-W-HOTELS), which aims to take its exclusive feeling and reproduce it in as many cities as possible. W Hotels are part of the Starwood corporation, which also runs the Westin and Sheraton hotel chains. Since 1998, Starwood has opened about 25 W locations across the country, including four in Manhattan. I decided to try out the newest, just off Union Square. The room ($269 and smallish) had more similarities to those of the SoHo Grand than differences, but the daring leap here is the addition of color-splotch artwork and a deep-purple blanket to the de rigueur black-white-gray bohemian palette. The robe here goes for $125.

My next stop was the Hudson Hotel (800-444-4786), the newest offering from famed hotelier Ian Schrager. Everyone was talking about the Hudson and saying the same things: The rooms are tiny; the bar is hot. The former certainly proved to be true, even though I asked for a "superior" for $205 a night (one notch up from the cheapest). There was a sliver of wood floor visible all around the bed, and a chic-looking but thin curtain concealing a bathroom roughly the size of a shower stall. Plus my sixth-floor room faced the street, giving me plenty of opportunity to listen to the grinding Manhattan traffic.

Ah, but comfort's not the real goal at these places--appearance is. The lobby at the Hudson is vast, with a lot of brick, an epic chandelier, and a sort of mountain-lodge atmosphere. The most striking thing in the bar was an immense log affixed with chair backs. This struck me as a perfect emblem for the Hudson's obsession with form at the expense of function, and I moved on before waiting to see how "hot" the bar would get.

Insufficiently rested, I arrived the next morning at the Royalton (800-635-9013), a more venerable Schrager creation that is practically an ancestor of the designed-hotel trend. I had low hopes but was pleasantly surprised. The place was almost sleepy, and my room ($245) was quiet and comfortable. The highlight: a huge bathroom with stone surfaces and a big sheet of glass marking off a third of it as the shower area. The overall style was a mildly outdated version of "futuristic." It wasn't retro, exactly, but maybe the bleeding edge of retro. If I were a true design aficionado, maybe I'd have a problem with that look. Then again, maybe I'd be sitting in the hottest bar in town--on a giant log.