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.
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.