Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
Luxury that’s utterly over the top
Pillow butlers, cliff-edge zip wires and your own private nest above a volcano... a new series visits the world’s most astonishingly opulent hotels. By Jenny Johnston
bored of the view from your £1,339-anight cliff-pool villa, you can visit ‘Diana’s point’, where the princess sat while Prince Charles painted in 1986.
OLYMPIAN INDULGENCE
Yes, there is such a job as a ‘pillow butler’. At the Grand Resort Bad Ragaz, at the foot of the Swiss Alps, he helps guests choose which pillow best suits them. There are 14 choices – even ones stuffed with lavender, cork or thyme.
This upmarket resort, where a spa suite can cost £1,600 a night, is near an ancient gorge with thermal waters. But the place is at the cutting edge of health and wellness tourism. There are two spas and two massage areas, golf courses, and Olympicstandard sports facilities – which is maybe why tennis champion Roger Federer is a fan. The clinic with 80 medical staff offers everything from surgery to sleep therapy. The mineralrich waters are even used in the hotel’s own beer – and masterclasses are offered in how to tell the difference between 30 types of mineral water.
WINDOW ON THE WORLD
The Silo is an industrial- chic, artthemed hotel in Cape Town. It sits in the former elevator shaft of a 93-year- old 187ft grain silo, once the tallest building in sub-Saharan Africa. The most jaw-dropping aspect of the redesign, however? The windows. British designer Thomas Heatherwick – the man behind our 2012 Olympic cauldron – created 96 feature windows, which contain more than 5,300 individual panes of glass and cost £50,000 each. But how are they cleaned? Well, abseiling is obviously involved but also a mixture of citrus peel and alcohol. Who knew? It’s no wonder penthouse suites cost £4,946 a night.
YOUR OWN VOLCANO
We all love a room with a view, but an active volcano? Such is the case at the Hacienda Hotel Vira Vira, a luxury adventure hotel at the gateway to Chile’s Lake District, where guests seem to regard it as a bonus that their resident volcano regularly spews ash and lava. Nestled in a 23- hectare national park along the Liucura River, the hotel has just six rooms and 12 riverside villa suites, where a five- night, all-inclusive stay costs £3,270. It even has a cheese factory making 15 different types of cheese for guests to enjoy. A bit whiffy? Well, the lingering smell here is of money.
KING OF THE CASTLE
How do you compete with azure seas and coral reefs when you’re in rainy Ireland? By heading to a castle, of course. Ashford Castle, set in 350 acres, was founded 800 years ago by the Anglo-Norman de Burgo family. It was later home to the Guinness clan. With a £66 million restoration completed in 2015, its owners now hope to turn the castle into one of the world’s finest hotels.
It offers clay-pigeon shooting and falconry. Silver service in the George V restaurant is de rigueur and the four- poster beds envelop you like marshmallow. So expensive is the fabric wallpaper that it is cleaned by vacuum. It’s no surprise that a night in the Presidential Suite can cost £4,000.
The 83-room castle is a popular wedding venue for celebrities too – actor Pierce Brosnan and wife Keely Shaye Smith held their star-studded reception there in 2001, while Westlife singer Shane Filan and golfer Rory McIlroy chose it for their weddings
2003 and 2017 respectively.
Amazing Hotels: Life Beyond The Lobby, Tuesday, 9pm, BBC2.
How high- end must a hotel be if most guests arrive via private plane – and where there is no check-in desk (queuing is so passé)? It’s fair to say that if you watch Amazing Hotels: Life Beyond The Lobby, you might feel your own holidays, however expensive, look rather low-rent. Six jaw-dropping hotels feature in the new series, presented by journalist and restaurant reviewer Giles Coren and MasterChef: The Professionals judge Monica Galetti. They’ll never be satisfied with a budget break again.
THE HOLLYWOOD GETAWAY
The fact that guests arrive on the atoll of Tetiaroa in French Polynesia via private plane says it all. They are greeted by a private butler and, in the absence of anything as common as a reception desk, whisked straight to their private villas.
The first hotel featured in this series is located not far from Monica’s birthplace of Samoa, but a world away from the locations most of us visit. The exclusive Brando Resort is one of the world’s most luxurious eco-resorts, with a history as sparkling as the seas around it.
Actor Marlon Brando fell in love with Tetiaroa when filming Mutiny On The Bounty in 1962, and bought the place, once the vacation spot for members of the Tahitian royalty. His vision was to create the most impressive – yet environmentally friendly – hotel in the world.
He died before this happened, but the resort is a magnet for the rich and famous. Leonardo DiCaprio and Barack Obama are regulars. The biggest attraction for them – apart from watching whales from the veranda? The total privacy that means no autograph hunters, no tourists and no hoi-polloi.
So what do you get on an £11,000a-night holiday? Well, the resort’s 35 villas are quaint but you also get a 24hour butler. And the cleaners remove their shoes before entering villas so as not to walk grains of sand inside.
ONE FOR THE HIGH-FLIERS
Where do millionaire daredevils holiday? Perhaps the Anantara Al Jabal Al Akhdar in Oman, which has a jaw-dropping climbing course, with a zip-wire along the cliff edge. Our intrepid presenters do a test run of the stomach- churning route – 30m drops plus Giles’ prolific fear of heights makes for TV gold.
Built to resemble an ancient fort, and situated 2,000m above sea level on the rim of a canyon, the hotel has 35 swimming pools. And if you get