Any hotel worth paying attention to looks like no other place. Once, people took that for granted, but now, as everything all over the world looks more and more the same, being different is a more precious quality than ever. Of course I’d rather stay at the Ritz-Carlton in Dearborn than at the John Portman–designed Buck Rogers fantasy at the Renaissance Center down the road in Detroit, but that doesn’t make the Ritz-Carlton any less of an ordinary modern box into which a few antiques and a boatload of marble have been dropped.
Once, hotel architects knew that an essential part of their mission was to give each hotel they designed an identity of its own. When Henry Hardenbergh, who in 1907 designed the Plaza, New York’s greatest work of hotel architecture, was called to Washington to do the Willard and then to Boston to design the Copley Plaza, he made each building distinctive, though the sibling relationship between these landmarks isn’t hard to figure out. I.M. Pei, to his credit, tried to do something different in his Four Seasons in New York, perhaps the best new urban hotel of the past ten years. It’s a stone tower, vaguely traditional, with a processional entrance as good as the Waldorf’s: in the front door, up a grand staircase to a huge concierge desk, behind which the concierges stand, looking like judges about to bang their gavels and send you away. This hotel makes no bones about being intimidating, but at least it knows what it is trying to do, which is to tell you that you have arrived in a place that is serious, elegant, grand, and absolutely sure of itself. I have no masochist’s desire to be intimidated by hotels, but I have to concede that one of the signs of the best hotels is a light coating of hauteur, which is quickly abandoned at the first sign that you are a normal, gracious, and appreciative human being.
Genuine warmth, as opposed to programmed warmth, often goes hand in hand with genuine architecture. The sitting rooms that pass for lobbies at London’s Connaught are ever-so-slightly dowdy, but comforting beyond words; to me, they have a certain glow that is not like that of my home or any other home I know, but they are nurturing in a way that you want your home to be. The sense of being taken care of by the architecture of the Connaught, even when the staff is nowhere visible, almost belies the fact that its sitting rooms are public spaces. The same is true at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston, an original that predates the mass-production Ritzes, and at another hotel that is by no one’s measure elegant but has always had, for me, a sumptuous frumpiness that exudes warmth: the gloriously anachronistic Mohonk Mountain House in New Paltz, New York.
Mohonk is spectacularly sited on a lake, and it calls to mind all sorts of great resort hotels that exist to help us escape from urbanity, from the serene Villa d’Este on Lake Como to the lovably eccentric Ahwahnee in Yosemite National Park. But I find myself always coming back, in the end, to the idea of the hotel as a metaphor for the city, since that is what hotels always are, wherever they may be. You can feel it in the soaring lobby of the Brown Palace in Denver, which remains one of the great rooms in America, however much Hyatt may have turned atriums into a cliché; or in the intimate lobby of the St. Regis in New York, where activity is compressed into a space that has the intensity of a tiny package from Tiffany’s; or at the Dorchester or the Savoy in London or the Fairmont in San Francisco or the Grand in Rome. To walk into any of these places is not just to enter a room but to step into an urban square where you feel as comfortable as you do at home and as exalted as you do in the greatest public space.
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