Excerpt from: 21st Century Hotel Introduction "The Station Hotel?.It''s a building of small architectural merit built for some unknown purpose at the turn of the century. It was converted into a hotel by public subscription. I stayed there once myself as a young man. It has a reputation for luxury that baffles the most undemanding guest." -- Dr. Prentice in What The Butler Saw by Joe Orton. The phrase "21st-century-hotel design" inevitably has a touch of the futuristic about it, something light years away from Joe Orton''s ominously recognizable Station Hotel.
True, we are already living in that twenty-first century, but there remains a sense of impersonal progress about the phrase, almost as though hotel design strides ahead and those of us who actually stay in hotels must somehow try to keep up with the trends. In fact, the exact opposite is true. Hotels have never been so earnestly responsive to the Zeitgeist--or at least what hotel operators, owners, developers and designers perceive to be the Zeitgeist. How else can we explain the latest trends in hotel design, which at one extreme increasingly blur the border between lodging, lifestyle, refuge and living theatre, and at the other still seek continue to reinvent the more discreet manners and style of the grand hotels of the past? This book seeks to explore some of the latest trends and ideas in a sector that has often experienced some difficulty in finding appropriate descriptive terms for the many different shades of hotel experience on offer all over the world. Part of this difficulty derives directly from the worldwide nature of business travel and tourism. Although local notions of luxury in Mexico City are not necessarily the same as those in Manhattan, now that international travel has homogenized our expectations of comfort and service, it is often left to international "design", in the broadest sense of the word, to add the distinction, variety and shading that local manners would once have imposed, and to project the hotel''s image into a market place that now embraces the borderless Internet. Trends are much harder to pin down than might be imagined. The practicing experts--designers, architects, developers and owners--who might be considered to be the most involved and therefore the most informed observers of hotel design, usually turn out to have a vested interest, and seek to extrapolate from their own latest venture evidence that this is indeed the exact shape of things to come.
Perhaps more unguardedly revealing is the wealth of promotional copy generated by the marketing companies whose task it is to sell certain types of new hotel to the public. Someone once remarked, after a disastrous gastronomic tour of the United States, that he now knew the one thing that American restaurants did really well: the menu. Similarly, the overripe cartes du jour issuing from those who market particular kinds of hotel seem intent upon making them sound like Lourdes, Shangri-La and Eldorado all rolled into one. The chasm between promise and reality is ludicrous but in certain cases pretense and pretension may be camouflaged, or at least diminished, by interior design or architecture of considerable quality. What then does this tell us? That there seems to be a growing public appetite for hotels masquerading as health farms and spiritual retreats and that some quite distinguished hotel designers are cheerful accomplices in fashionable bids to realize them. It tells us why every other hotel must now have its spa, a word suddenly divested of its true meaning and commercially re-coined by the hotel industry to mean any sort of indoor water feature with a press agent. It tells us, too, that any hotel fortunate enough to be surrounded by dramatic natural beauty would do well to investigate every local peak, crag and rill for regional evidence of spiritual history and then promptly install a totemic crystal energy chamber before publicizing itself as a time-honoured retreat for burnt-out movers and shakers. More interestingly, these excesses have filtered down to make more sober health and fitness facilities (often with their vaguely defined overtones of "well-being" and "purification") de rigueur at almost all new hotels, cutting across every category with the exception of those budget establishments unable to provide any non-essential services at all.
Looking Back, Looking Forward What of those categories? The main ones adopted in this book are admittedly loose groupings but also, one hopes, helpful ones. The idea of reinterpreting tradition is an enduring and fascinating one, calling for very precise readings of contemporary perspectives on the past. Every age throws up popular culture versions of a past period. To take just one example, an epic eleven-part 1980s UK television version of Brideshead Revisited fixed the visual and social manners of inter-war British aristocracy for a whole generation and, incidentally, still exerts its influence today, leading a London hotelier to describe his new establishment as Brideshead Revisited meets Sex and the City. This is a cultural get-together about which one feels Evelyn Waugh might have had something to say, despite the fact that it is the television series not the novel that is being referred to. In short, tradition is a media-mediated moveable feast from which the passing moment picks and chooses. The hotels featured in the Traditional Reinterpretations section of this book can therefore be seen to be reinventing very selective elements from the built past for a modern consumer. This consumer''s visual sophistication is certainly greater than ever before, but he or she is also more heavily influenced by a wealth of manipulated images of the past that have been created by film and television.
Tradition, or the illusion of it, may bring reassurance but people also want the manners of the past to be invisibly blended with the benefits of today; they are certainly smart enough to know that a Las Vegas'' desert recreation of Venice is a joke and not a reinterpretation. To cater for such a clientele, designers and architects must avoid pastiche and create, instead, a much subtler synthesis of tradition. Mass Appeal By definition most mainstream hotels have always been more concerned with reflecting style rather than actually setting it. However, today even the mainstream cannot afford to fall too far behind when it comes to design credibility. Mainstream Experiments, therefore, considers some hotels that have sought to combine the established image of the business, tourist or luxury hotel with fresh design thinking that unmistakably hooks them into the spirit of the times without alienating guests who may still seek the familiar reassurance--and sometimes the omnipresent corporate-style hallmark--of the trusted hotel chain. Here, the prevailing trend seems to be one of trying to square the circle between corporate control and a more informal, independent-looking presence in the market place. Much of the evidence suggests that the balance will tip in favour of loosely branded individual identities as the big chains start to ape Ian Schrager''s now legendary recipe for success: buying up existing hotels that have been under-marketed or under-branded and using well-judged design to help them to shed their faceless images in favour of an attractive new variety of carefully managed individualism. Oddballs and Auteurs No such balancing acts trouble either the designer hotel or the kind of hotel that has been conceived for a unique purpose or founded upon an attention-grabbing gimmick.
Designer Hotels deals with seven design experiments that can be further subdivided. Manhattan''s Soho House benefits from the attentions of a designer, Ilse Crawford, who is herself something of a minor jet-set celebrity. The result is an almost perfect synthesis of real visual style and celebrity buzz, a latter-day equivalent of the rather more austere cachet once enjoyed by, say, Boston''s Parker Hotel when Charles Dickens used to stay there. Today, no one wants to stay at a hotel where some long-dead famous person once lodged, if only because the place''s corresponding antiquity is likely to raise grave doubts about things like plumbing and the telecommunications. What trendy, up-to-the-minute guests really want to hear is that famously fussy divas like Diana Ross or Barbra Streisand occupied their hotel of choice just last month. For those who like their avant-garde design undiluted, HI Hotel in Nice typifies what happens when a designer is given an unconditional license to reinvent the possibilities of a hotel. Staying at this establishment is not for the faint-hearted but rather for those who want to align themselves with modish experiments in organizing living space with surreal adventures in room role-reversal or other demanding hospitality experiences. Most of these "experiments" are unlikely to be welcomed by a weary businessman who is simply looking for a bar that doesn''t resemble a James Bond film set and a bed that doesn''t turn into a bath.
Some premises resist the attentions of even the most dedicated designer, as an old American Legion building in Paris illustrates. Andrée Putman, past mistress of the Big Hotel Design Push of the 1980s, has certainly done enough to make this old building into a new hotel with a certain touch of class but conservation considerations limited her interventions, perhaps more than she would have liked. Putman''s peer in the 80s designer revolution was Philippe Starck whose unmistakable stamp can be seen all over a venerable San Francisco hotel, also featured in this chapter. Here, though, the treatment is unexpectedly Post Modern an.