It is remarkable that a native of Sweden — a country where décor leans towards the spare and simple — is responsible for creating the anything-but-minimalist Crosby Street Hotel which opened this month in New York’s bustling SoHo neighborhood.

Kit Kemp, design chief and one half of the husband-and-wife team behind the perennially cool Firmdale Hotels, arrives in the U.S. after having fashioned six one-of-a-kind boutique properties in London. At Crosby Street, the couple’s first venture beyond Britain, they up the collection’s ante on flair and whimsy further still. With such eco-cred touches as an organic vegetable roof garden, they’re also aiming to make the hotel one of the first in New York City to be LEED certified.

Firmdale has transformed a former eight-story car park into an 11-floor sanctuary of 86 rooms and suites (with no two alike), ranging in design schemes from humbug candy stripes to giant paisleys. Bathrooms are sleek, marbled to the hilt, while every sleeping salon boasts floor-to-ceiling windows, a bumptious bed of Henry VIII dimensions, and the now-standard flat screen TV and iPod docking station.

Original modern art, framed in fluorescent colored plexi-glass, splatters the lobby’s walls. A 10-foot-high sculpture dominates the light-filled entry, overlooking a leafy sculpture garden (open to only guests) with suspended lanterns. The subterranean screening room, however — kitted out with 99 orange leather Poltrona Frau chairs and violet wool padded walls — will soon be open to the public when the hotel launches its Film Club dinner-and-a-movie series, much like the one available at Firmdale’s original Soho Hotel in London.

When I inquired why the Union Jack wasn’t hoisted alongside the Stars and Stripes on the building’s façade, I was told that the Kemps want the hotel to have a uniquely American flair. Even still, Crosby Street still feels more like a super stylish, slightly bonkers, English relative who has flown across the pond. Like much of New York, however, it plays like a bit like a commercial about success and achievement, and left me with the desire to shake hands with every guest there and congratulate them for having made it.