The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
After all this, bring on the bling!
Forget homeliness and sleek minimalism, Anna Hart is longing to stay in a grande-dame hotel
These are words I never expected to type, but here goes: my eyes feel like they’re on a diet. Months of lockdown, staring at the surroundings in my one-bedroom flat, have left my eyes starved of fabulousness, of newness, of surprises. I know I am fortunate to have a perfectly comfortable home. But even a wholesome diet – something with chicken breasts and grapefruit and perhaps even a square of dark chocolate – feels like deprivation after a series of long weeks. My eyes are pining for the lavish interiors of grand-dame hotels: sweeping staircases, velvet drapes, tasteless artwork shouting above a headboard, ornaments that would prove deadly to a pet or a child. What my peepers would give for a nibble of a crystal chandelier, a drop of gilded picture frame, the sweet taste of a velvet chaise longue, a small sip of polished marble.
So I am resigned to the fact I shall emerge from this lockdown with the aesthetic tastes of Liberace. Sleek, minimalist “Scandi-inspired” hotels are about as enticing to me as an Ikea wardrobe. I know I’m not supposed to think like this. The rash of “pared-back” city hotels all happened with travellers like me in mind. As a millennial traveller, a budget-conscious, frequent flier with tastes dictated by Instagram and the cover of Elle Decoration, I’m supposed to appreciate exposed brickwork and enamel pendant factory lights (lazily dubbed “industrial chic”) and blonde wooden flooring and dove-grey felt sofas. But the problem with reverseengineering a hotel’s design with a specific demographic in mind is this: people are fickle. And, as travellers, we’re perhaps the most fickle bunch of all. Because the whole point of travel is to break free of sameness. We seek a splendid shock to the system. And thanks to repeated lockdowns during which we’ve had plenty of time to appreciate “homeliness” and “familiarity”, I know I want quite the opposite.
And the hotels I miss the most, the first bedrooms I shall book, as soon as it feels right to do so, are historic grandedame hotels. The impeccably glamorous but tough old birds who have weathered many storms – wars, recessions, pandemics – with dignity, grace, and far too many chandeliers. I’m thinking of Rio’s Copacabana Palace, a 1923 neoclassical wedding cake of a hotel who, as the most iconic building on Rio’s most iconic beach is one of the few hotels in the world genuinely deserving of that annoying word, “iconic”. She’s a ridiculous hotel, but ridiculousness in Rio sounds like everything I want right now.
I’m also thinking of The Plaza in New
York, a towering 20-storey beaux-arts landmark who threw open her doors in 1907 and immediately made the Upper East Side Manhattan’s most soughtafter address, a perennial birthday party for the so-called Jazz Age. Of all the hotels I have visited, this is the one that most uncannily makes guests feel like we’re in a film the moment we step through the door. This is partly because the lobby is filmset lavish, bedecked with gilded chandeliers, gleaming marble and elaborate floral arrangements, but robustly reinforced by virtually every scene we glimpse in the hotel being quite literally a movie scene. Cary
Grant sipped a martini in the Oak Bar in North by Northwest and you can also expect flashbacks of everything from Crocodile Dundee to Bride Wars to The Great Gatsby. I adore this, because sometimes, travel is all about feeling like you’re in a movie.
My childhood was spent in Belfast and Singapore, and while Belfast’s Europa Hotel had the street cred of being the most-bombed hotel in the world, it was Singapore’s Raffles Hotel that first truly seduced me. Raffles (originally a 10-room bungalow) has charmed the socks off guests since 1887. The Queen, Charlie Chaplin and Michael Jackson are among its notable guests and it was the writer Somerset Maugham who noted: “Raffles stands for all the fables of the exotic East.” And it does: the neoclassical colonial architectural flourishes set travellers daydreaming, and set the stage for our own stories.
Here in the UK, I’m daydreaming about the Connaught, Claridge’s and Gleneagles. And I know that when I finally do visit, I’ll savour every single detail. Don’t show me simplicity and safety; after this lockdown diet, I’m hungry for the lobster thermidor of hotels. Give me all the glitz of the Ritz.