There are two different ways to stay in a hotel, or maybe it is that there are two different kinds of people, the ones who stay in their rooms and the ones who don’t. I am firmly in the latter category. There is nothing wrong with a good hotel room, mind you, and I have slept well in many of them. But that isn’t the point. A good hotel is a place, a town, a city, a world unto itself, and the aura it exudes has almost nothing to do with its rooms and almost everything to do with everything else—the lobby, the bar, the restaurants, the façade, the signs, even the corridors and the elevators. If you are the sort of person for whom room service is the high point of a hotel stay, you will not understand what I mean. But if you are one of those people who take home those little telephone pads because seeing the words Crillon or Bel-Air on your own night table gives you a certain thrill—well, I urge you to read on.
Hotels are places that confer upon us, by the mere fact of our being in them, the sense that we are cosmopolitan, sophisticated, dignified, attractive, busy, daring, or rich. That is no mean trick, and it has to do with something more than just the sense of being in a unique place, though that is certainly the beginning. Neither is it a matter of size, or even of architectural grandeur. You can feel happy when you take the elevator to the top of the Eiffel Tower or stroll through the concourse of Grand Central Terminal, but you do not feel transformed, however pleasing these spaces may be. Go into the Ritz in Paris, however, or the Plaza in New York, and you feel strangely, mysteriously, delightfully taken out of your skin.
A great hotel does what a great city does: It holds forth the promise of infinite possibility, of endless choice. Everything that could not happen anywhere else seems able to happen here. The mundane business of your daily life falls away. The allure of a hotel is not the same as that of a tourist site, because its relationship to you is participatory, which is why the Plaza Athénée in Paris can have a greater emotional impact on you than Versailles, even though the hotel doesn’t quite come up to Louis XIV’s architectural standard. Lewis Mumford once described the function of a city as “providing, as it were, a stage upon which the drama of social life may be enacted, with the actors taking their turns as spectators, and the spectators as actors,” and that is exactly what happens, in miniature, in a hotel. However awesome Versailles may be, the play is long over, and you are walking through an empty stage. The Plaza Athénée is a living drama in which you are one of the characters, merely by virtue of being there.
In a great hotel, you are poised, magnificently and perfectly, between the public and the private realms. Where else does it happen that you can see the world pass by and yet at the same time feel protected and cared for? In a hotel you experience the physical comfort and luxury of the most intimate places and the grandeur of the most monumental, simultaneously. Ordinary things become ritual: To arrive and depart is to promenade, even if you prefer to remain only one of Lewis Mumford’s spectators.
“The great advantage of a hotel is that it’s a refuge from home life,” George Bernard Shaw wrote, but that is only the beginning of it. It is not so much what the hotel takes you away from as what it brings you to, such as public spaces like none other. I take particular joy in the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, a great skyscraper by Schultze & Weaver completed in 1931, and the place that, more than any other, defines the notion of the hotel as a metaphor for the city. The twin-towered building covers a full city block, and the lobby, a three-story-high salon of rich paneling and Art Moderne metal details, sits buried in the center. You do not find it by walking through the front door; you have to burrow into the heart of the hotel, walking past cocktail lounges and shops and elevators and passageways until suddenly the space bursts into the monumental glory of the lobby. It’s not hard to find this room—all you have to do is walk in a straight line—but you still feel as if you’ve reached someplace special when you get there.
The lobby of the Waldorf is both a crossroads and a lingering place, at once this hotel’s Times Square and its Piazza San Marco. The Waldorf’s layout is clear and at the same time exceedingly complex, and this is surely intentional. While you are not supposed to get lost as you try to move about, you should feel that you have all kinds of opportunities to go in all sorts of directions, just as you would in a real city. Usually hotels as big as the Waldorf aren’t as interesting, or as able to provide the same degree of magic, even when they try. The megahotels of John Portman, like the 73-story Westin Peachtree Plaza in Atlanta and the 1,354-room Westin Bonaventure in Los Angeles, are round glass towers set over futuristic swirling bases of concrete that attempt to evoke grandeur and end up feeling as inviting as freeway ramps, and just as confusing.
I am not sure that we have entirely lost the ability to make elegant hotels in our time, but we have certainly lost the ability to make big ones with great style. The average large hotel today is staggeringly banal, a Motel 6 on steroids. Never mind that they have fitness centers and shopping malls and 16 ballrooms and restaurants serving the latest pan-Asian cuisine. So, these days, do airports. I wonder, come to think of it, if the best way to judge a hotel is to apply the airport test: If anything about it reminds you of an airport, it fails.
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