LUXURY TRAVEL NEWS
Darius Sanai's, our Editor-in-Chief muses on the viability of hotels as fashion brands, and visits three of Europe's most compelling city resorts
It’s hard to put a date on when hotels stopped being hotels and started being luxury lifestyle experiences. Many of us may remember the days when you went into a five-star hotel and you were surrounded b|y ... a five star hotel. The hotel ran its own restaurants, had its name on its toiletries, employed its own barber, and the stout furniture was made by someone you had never heard of (unless it was genuinely antique, which only the bravest hoteliers would risk).
Stroll into a top hotel now, and you’ll be seduced by brands and partnerships the hotel thinks, hopes and believes are either part of your lifestyle – or should be. These items don’t just serve a purpose, like a Nespresso machine; they are there to create your wraparound luxury cocoon, surrounded by philosophies with which you are familiar and of which you approve or aspire to.
When a lot of thought goes into them, these can be both clever and unexpected: genuine enhancements to the hotel experience. To take a trio of hotels as an example: stay in a suite at the Connaught in London and the handmade Goyard trunk in the room is available to you to store your finest clothes for your next visit. At Soho House New York, your minibar is replenished daily with unguents from uber-skincare brand Kiehls. At the Mandarin Oriental in London, your dining options are brought to you by Daniel Boulud, the New York superchef, or Heston Blumenthal, the British contemporary maestro. The food is great, but that’s not the point: the brands give you one of the most important things in travel today, bragging rights. They’re a story in themselves.
It’s a similar story with hotels across the world: think Peninsula Hong Kong and you’ll think Rolls Royce, for their fleet of Phantoms; at the Lungarno Hotels in Florence they’ll let you know that the interior design is from Ferragamo (who happen to own the hotels). In many ways the challenge for hoteliers now is to ensure that what they are doing hasn’t been done before. La Prairie spa? Seen that. Krug Room for Champagne? Yawn – the Dorchester did it years ago. Gordon Ramsay restaurant – you mean there are hotels that don’t have one of these?
Perhaps it all started with Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell, who are credited for inventing the designer/boutique hotel in the 1980s, recognising that the actual hotel was less important than the experience of the hotel. Fashion, design, style, media, art, everything melded into one party-ish, chilled out experience.
But I wonder whether, like any trend, it’s not extending itself a little too far. Versace, Armani, Bulgari and Missoni have all launched branded hotels and residences in the past decade or so. Unlike the hoteliers above, who have thoughtfully cherry-picked brands which their guests are comfortable with or aspire to, these tend to be monobrand experiences. Some of them are very fine – the original Bulgari hotel in Milan rewrote the book for luxury hotels in that city. But I wonder whether single luxury brand experiences as a whole work for travel – or for residences. I admire the verve of a Missoni stripe as much as the next man or woman. But what should you expect from a Missoni hotel? Striped curtains and cushions, certainly, as I duly found in my one experience at a Hotel Missoni to date, in Edinburgh. But what does a Missoni bathroom look like? Is a Missoni bed comfortable? Is a Missoni bar any good, or is it populated by slightly ageing Italian trendsters nursing an espresso while chatting away on their mobiles?
As it happens the hotel was good in some parts – the (modern Italian) restaurant served up some excellent fish – and average in others: the room looked like a generic contemporary hotel. In that sense it was no better or worse than any of Ian Schrager’s hotels from his glory days, or many of the raft of boutique imitators that have come since. But it didn’t have a story. Staying in a Missoni (or any other fashion branded) hotel is a one-line brag. There’s an element of fashion victim about it, like being dressed head to toe in a single brand.
What applies to hotels also applies to residences – or serviced apartments as they used to be called (sounds much less sexy, doesn’t it?). Bulgari is selling branded residences in central London. These are extremely swish, but I’m not sure I would want to tell people I spent multi-millions on a home that is serviced by an Italian jeweller. When I think Bulgari I think giant gold rings with diamonds, and that’s great: but what does “I live in a Bulgari apartment” say about me, other than I need the endorsement of a luxury jewellery brand to create my own personal identity? Bulgari is a wonderful jeweller, but it is precisely that, a jeweller. Unlike Missoni, Ralph Lauren, Armani or Hermès, it doesn’t have any sort of pedigree in interior design. And none of them have any expertise in running a hotel or an apartment. “I live in a Ritz-Carlton residence” says you like six-star service and attention to detail in every aspect of your home. “I live in a (fill in well known brand) residence” says to me you are a victim of brand culture, someone who likes wearing their brand on their sleeve.
That’s not to say the Bulgari residences aren’t wonderful or won’t sell: my view is most likely a minority one. But it’s backed by a trend that emerged in the most recent Harrison Group survey – the most authoritative in the field – of wealthy Americans. The 2011 survey found that 41% of affluent Americans believe “the brands I wear say a lot about who I am”, down from 51% three years previously; meanwhile only 32% of the wealthy said they would pay more for prestigious brands, compared to 51% in 2008.
Having said all that, there are luxury hotels that offer partnerships outside the traditional luxury field – and do extremely well out of them. LUX recently visited once such edifice, the Breidenbacher Hof in Dusseldorf, Germany. Behind the historic palace hotel facade, this is a building that was recently demolished and rebuilt to modern luxe specifications. You can dodge touring rock stars and assorted sheikhs in the cigar bar, and be surrounded by formal dining grandeur in the restaurant.
But the real sell for the Breidenbacher Hof is its direct access – without leaving the building – to two of Gemany’s leading plastic/aesthetic surgeons. Drs Malte Villnow and Bratislav Matejic are the reasons many of the guests visit the hotel – and the reason why so many of the guests seem to be wearing bandages on parts of their anatomy: they’re not injured, it’s deliberate. Jesting aside, it is an extremely convenient destination if cosmetic surgery is your aim: both Dusseldorf and Cologne- Bonn airports nearby have international connections, you are whisked to the hotel in an SClass limo, chill out in your suite, visit the good doctors, spend a day or two recovering and shopping (Dusseldorf has some of the best luxury shopping in Germany), and swoosh, you’re out.
Nobody needs to know you’ve been anywhere. The Breidenbacher Hof merits an overall LUX rating of 17.5/20. More if you need a new nose, and even more if you are fond of Altbier, the distinctive dark ale of Dusseldorf.
I didn’t try the offerings of the good doctors in Dusseldorf personally, but a recent experience visiting the Dolder Grand, the lavishly refurbished hotel/resort above Zurich, reminded me how the small things can make all the difference. After a packed flight, I was one in a stream of generally male, besuited humanity coming off the Banker Express (LHR-ZRH) when I spotted, well before the baggage carousel, a chap holding a sign with my name. The Dolder’s limo has special airside access and while it would have made no objective difference meeting my chauffeur five minutes later in the arrivals hall, the touch made a big difference to my experience.
This thoroughness infuses all the staff at the Dolder, as you might expect from a flagship hotel in the country where many in the hotel industry go for their training. The receptionist knew everything about me – recited my spa schedule by heart as she took me up to the room in the lift. The chap ordering me a taxi told me instantly mine would be the second cab to arrive, in around three minutes. The Dolder is like a case study of service excellence: hoteliers could visit to benchmark their own. But that creates the thought: is it possible for staff to be over trained? Too good? This crossed my mind when the very nice room service chap was arranging my breakfast tray just so, and explaining all the different elements of my breakfast as if he were a waiter in a molecular gastronomy restaurant (“And this is your toast, brown toast...”). Perhaps that’s just me; but if it were possible to stir in just 2% of Soho House-style chillout into the staff mix at the Dolder, they really would be perfect.
The rest of the hotel is spectacular, in all ways. The views in one direction are of woods, lake and mountains; in the other you look over the city of Zurich, a five-minute ride down the hill. The original hotel dates to the 19th century and underwent a four-year renovation overseen by Foster + Partners between 2004 and 2008. The results are spectacular, with six-metre high floor-toceiling windows curving around the considerable length of my suite. The bath was perfectly located next to one. All very spectacular and uplifting (though perhaps not particularly cosy). While nobody could doubt the pure architectural merit of the swooping, curving corridors, of one cantilevered above another in one case, it can feel a little soulless. And why was the dramatic drive entrance area with its views over the city not planted with trees or a garden instead of concrete? One is reminded that Foster is renowned for his office buildings, rather than his hotels.
But that’s a subjective view. The huge, thoroughly equipped and beautifully maintained spa; the spacious and generous Garden restaurant; the adjoining golf course; the dark panelled bar with a dead ringer for Tom Waits on the piano: all of these combine with the space and the views to make it head and shoulders, literally and metaphorically, above any other hotel in Zurich, and it receives a LUX rating of 18.5/20. Be aware that this is the most expensive hotel in an expensive city: at 35 euros, a chicken club sandwich from the bar menu really has some singing to do.
Staying with European city hotels for this issue, it was a delight to see a boutique from super-chic Parisian fashion house Azzaro in the lobby of the Mandarin Oriental in Barcelona. Those who know Mandarins as giant steel-and-glass towers from 04 04 offerings in places like Miami, New York and Hong Kong may be surprised by the Barcelona hotel. Situated on the Passeig Gracia, the city’s most elite shopping street, it’s boutique in size, look and feel. Instead of a grand atrium there’s a chic, lowceilinged lobby and a very low-key restaurant immediately behind. My room was modern European in feel, coolly designed, with a bathroom separated by glass: this assumes a desire for a level of intimacy with your roommate at all times. There was a sweeping view of the street (a warning to luxurophiles: despite the hype Barcelona is still a regional Spanish city, and Gracia is not Rue Fauborg St Honoré. The Zegna store rubs shoulders with the downmarket Desigual and a McDonalds.)
While it was all very chi-chi, it didn’t feel very Mandarin Oriental, and I suspect this is entirely intentional. While some international groups like Four Seasons create extremely slick but generic luxury, Mandarin seems to have gone the other way, adding locality, personal touches and intuitive grace. My only objection was that breakfast was perhaps too boutique: a selection of plates rather than a giant buffet, and some of the selection was gone, and not replenished, at 9. All the better to fit into that Azzaro dress, I suppose, and altogether it receives a LUX rating of 18.5/20.
Darius Sanai is Editor in Chief of Conde Nast Contract Publishing 