Elegant Shelter: Hotel Memories

The Banff Springs Hotel, Alberta, Canada.

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Loved this recent piece in The New York Times travel section of hotel memories. Here’s a snippet:

“… In hotels, secular miracles are routinely made to occur. The quotidian extravagances (costly, it’s true) built into life at a decent hotel are not likely part of most people’s daily existence. We dutifully make our beds and wash our dishes and clean our own tubs.

In hotels, however, we are only temporary citizens. And while I tip religiously and make efforts to leave my room in a decent state of order, I know that the smudge on the wall, the faulty plumbing, the nuisance of ownership belong to someone else. I bring my own baggage but leave the usual problems behind. At a hotel, the messy remnants of dinner can be guiltlessly pushed into a corridor.”

The essay is long and lively, with specific reminiscences of a life often spent in rooms far away from home.

It made me think of the many hotels I’ve visited. Here are some of my own favorites:

– The Admiral’s Inn, English Bay, Antigua. How to forget the night, when I was perhaps seven or eight, I awoke to an odd flickering outside our second-floor windows? Fire! I woke up my mother to discover a sofa on the veranda below was alight. I returned to the hotel 20+ years later, still an elegant respite. Built in 1788, it offers historic intimate elegance, my favorite combination in a hotel.

-- The Ritz, Paris. I wish! The closest I’ve gotten to staying there, and it was extraordinarily lovely, was their dark, cozy bar where Jose and I ate mini hamburgers and drank costly cocktails and watched very wealthy, languid young guests taking it all for granted. A black, round cocktail napkin, the name in gold, is framed in our kitchen as a happy souvenir of a fun evening.

– The Four Seasons, Toronto. This was the very first of what would become a legendary world-spanning chain of hotels, then founder Issy Sharp’s radical, bold move to taking a motel on a seedy Toronto street and transforming it into an urban oasis. I had my 10th. birthday party at the pool there. Heaven!

– The Taos Inn, Taos, NM. This funky place is in one of my favorite towns. Founded in 1936, the hotel has small rooms with lots of character around a lovely central courtyard.

– The Banff Springs Hotel, Banff, Alberta. I spent one of the happiest weeks ever here, in March 2011, alone. This gorgeous property, built in 1888 and nestled in the Rockies, blends history, warmth, style and elegance. I can’t wait to go back.

– The Sylvia, Vancouver. It celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2012. Named for the daughter of the man who developed the Sylvia, the hotel, for a while, was used as residential housing — and my paternal grandmother lived there for a while. Right on the beach, with simple, bright rooms, it’s an affordable place to settle in with views of mountains and the ocean. I’ve stayed twice and loved it both times.

I’ve stayed at The Algonquin, built in 1902 on West 44th St. in New York City, a few times; another of a great hotel’s charms is its consistency. The Algonquin (shriek) is about to undergo a four-month renovation…and what on earth will its new corporate owners do to it? It’s already been renovated within the past decade and there are traditionalists like me and many others who choose a hotel because we like it the way it is. Mess with our memories and expectations at your peril!

Do you have a favorite hotel (and story?)

Vacations-Gone-Wrong: When The Hotel Is Great — But Not The Guests

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I don’t plan to blog about Tyler Brule every day, but his column in today’s FT is too delicious to miss — the subtle art of making sure your hotel guests are up to snuff:

Hoteliers spend a lot of time working on both the software and hardware to make for the perfect stay – at least, the best ones do. Newspapers and magazines devote countless column inches in their travel pages covering these developments at various hotels featuring the latest spa with yet another interpretation of a hot-stone treatment (how much room is there for innovation when it comes to lining up warm stones along a guest’s spine?), groundbreaking showers that reverse the ageing process and communications technology so smart you can order room service via Wi-Fi just by blinking the number of the item on the menu. Happy customers will spread the word by talking up the food, the service and the breathtaking views.

Rarely, however, is there much discussion about the most important and uncontrollable element of all – the guests themselves. For all the websites devoted to peer reviews and all the guidebooks that make bookshop shelves sag, there’s little space given to the types of people that a certain hotel attracts or repels.

It’s controversial territory to start ranking hotels by the quality of the guests but then that’s also part of the fun. I’m convinced that if I launched a series of guidebooks and accompanying website to support this idea there’d be no shortage of special interest groups lobbying for its closure because it would be seen as ageist, sexist, racist, anti-silicone, anti-Botox, homophobic and toddler-intolerant. It would also be highly readable and before long would be available in over 16 languages.

If a hotel can get all the basics right, then all that’s left to ensure that you return season after season are the quality of guests you’ll be lying next to by the sea, perusing the breakfast buffet with at 8am and gently smiling at when you share the lift. But how does a good general manager attract the right crowd?

I think about this often, because we’ve returned five times since 2001 to a small, quiet resort south of Montreal, Hovey Manor, partly because we’ve never once spent time around people there we wanted to flee.

How undemocratic! What snottiness!

You betcha.

After all the time I spend/endure dealing with New Yorkers’ monumental egos, braying cellphone conversations, dodging them as they race down the sidewalk staring into their PDAS expecting you, peon, to move, the last thing I can possibly cope with on vacation is….more of the same. I once flew all the way to bloody Cabo San Lucas, Mexico and ended up in a hotel that was full of the same sort of people I spend energy avoiding at home. Never again.

Hovey Manor manages to be elegant but not stuffy, warm and welcoming but not clingy, cosy but not schmaltzy. We always find there a few interesting, fun companions — the former ballet dancer with red hair to her waist, a judge and her psychologist husband, the Grand Prix fans on their way to Montreal.

And, sorry, no kids. I don’t know if they are not allowed, but the only non-adult I’ve ever seen was a boy of perhaps 15, perfectly-behaved. It’s not — thank God — a place where caps are worn at the table or cellphones are welcome everywhere. However silly it sounds, and I love it, one dresses for dinner.

A vacation is a precious time to relax and recharge. So, no, I don’t want to watch you play tonsil hockey with your 30-years-younger gal pal. Nor do I want to hear your music leaking from your earbuds or have to fight over the pool-side chairs. I really don’t want to deal with shrieking little children.

So I tend to choose smaller, European-style inns or boutique hotels.

Yet, as a traveler who oscillates happily between luxury and penury, I’ll be at the Vancouver youth hostel for two nights this summer, $38 a night for a room that might have 16 others in it. As someone who shared space for many years at camp and boarding school, it’s not a big deal — unless they snore.

Have you had a vacation ruined — or made wonderful — by the people at your hotel?