A spate of new luxury hotels cater to hardworking sybarites - and their computers.
By Lois Madison Reamy
June 2001
Institutional Investor Magazine
A spate of new luxury hotels cater to hardworking sybarites - and their computers.
The world’s great cities may seem block-to-block with great hotels, but there’s always room for more - provided they’re off the beaten track, offer great value or introduce a new level of luxury. Several world-class chains have opened grand new hotels, while boutique hotels promising special amenities are cropping up everywhere. We check into both.
How do you pick out the gems among the upstart small hotels? The giveaway is that they’re run by professionals, not by pickup teams consisting of relatives of the owner and out-of-work actors. By that benchmark, Europe has acquired some authentic gems lately, courtesy of two veteran hoteliers who, coincidentally, headed rival Hong Kong-based chains that set the tone for excellence at large hotels.
When Peter Tyrie was managing director of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group, he observed that many guests wanted “a high-quality location, high-quality services and high-quality surroundings . . . and [not] all of the public areas.” So when you stay at the boutique hotels of his Eton Town House Group, you won’t be paying for a grand ballroom you never set foot in. The group’s first venture was the Colonnade Town House, a renovated, 43-room Victorian hotel (where Sigmund Freud once lived) in London’s Little Venice, five blocks from Paddington Station. The Colonnade opened in 1999 and the next year won the London Tourism Board’s Hotel of the Year award in the under-50-room category. The newer, 49-room Academy Town House in Bloomsbury links five Georgian town houses. The Eton group provides morning papers, trouser presses, 24-hour room service, fast Internet lines in some rooms, conference suites and other first-class frills. Yet at about Ï155 ($222) per night for single or double occupancy (including an English breakfast), the rates are half those of a five-star London hotel.
Eton Town House plans to unveil the Square Mile’s first luxury hotel, Threadneedles, in September. Given its elegant accommodations and venerable premises - it’s in the old Midland Bank headquarters - the rates for its 70 rooms are not unreasonable at an average of $370. Tyrie notes that Threadneedles’ comfortable appointments and congenial staff will make it much less stuffy than its neighbor, the Bank of England. Web site: www.etontownhouse.com.
Another ex-Hong Kong hotelier, Robert Burns, founder of Regent International Hotels, became convinced that “small luxury properties are the future of the affluent travel market.” He spent five years and $30 million to convert a historic villa on Italy’s Lake Garda into the Grand Hotel a Villa Feltrinelli in Gargnano, about two hours by car from Milan. Opening this month, this 1892 neo-Gothic villa (home, briefly, to Benito Mussolini) bespeaks Old World splendor. Think of it as a setting for elegant house parties, where guests can wander among manicured, gaslit gardens and groves of orange and olive trees.
Burns coaxed home from London a local chef who has a way with Lake Garda’s unique corregone and lavarello fish, hired a French-American manager from an East Hampton (Long Island) country inn, added a spa and built a motor yacht to cruise the clear lake. The minimum rate for the 21 rooms from mid-May through October with single or double occupancy is $425 ($375 off-season). Burns built some monumental hotels: the Ritz-Carlton Millenia in Singapore, the Four Seasons Hotel New York and the Regent Hong Kong. But with no banks or boards looking over his shoulder, he says, “this is the only one that is all me.” Web site: www.villafeltrinelli.com.
The Four Seasons Hotel Prague, which opened earlier this year, is suitably eclectic in its architectural style. Situated on the Vltava River across from the Prague Castle, the 157-room hotel consists of a compound of three old buildings, built in the Renaissance, classical and Baroque styles, anchored by a new one. The hotel offers wireless Internet connections (see “Getting Unwired”), conference rooms, a health club and spa services. The business district is ten minutes away. The minimum corporate rate is $220 per night for a single room and $235 for a double. Web site: www.fourseasons.com.
Venezuela’s Four Seasons Hotel Caracas offers a haven 20 minutes from the hurly-burly of downtown, in the Altamira district. Secretarial and high-speed Internet services are available; after work, try the spa or the free-form swimming pool built on a lush upper deck. Basic rates are $230 for a single and $260 for a double. Web site: www.fourseasons.com.
Singapore’s onetime General Post Office - a mock Grecian temple fronting Marina Bay - has reopened as the 400-room Fullerton Singapore after a two-year, $230 million makeover. A five-minute walk from major banks and the Singapore Stock Exchange, the Fullerton has an 18,000-bottle wine cellar, a rooftop restaurant (which used to be a lighthouse), 13 meeting venues, chauffeured Rolls Royces and Mercedes, a spa and wireless Internet access throughout. A basic single is $269, a double $298. Web site: www.fullertonhotel.com.
Newcomers to the American hotel scene include two upmarket Hong Kong exports: the Mandarin Oriental, Miami, and the Peninsula Chicago. Both the Mandarin Oriental and Peninsula Group chains insist that they’re not attempting to transplant their home culture to the U.S. but simply introducing their usual personalized service. Even so, their Asian ancestry shows. Happily.
The Mandarin Miami offers a spa decorated in rice paper and bamboo, tatami mat massages and Florida stone crabs wrapped in seaweed. Guests staying at one of the 329 rooms, all with high ceilings, are entitled to full concierge services. The Mandarin Miami’s meeting rooms occupy 15,000 square feet, and its business center offers high-speed Internet connections (soon to be installed hotelwide). On the second-story terrace, the pool appears to blur into Biscayne Bay. The hotel is on residential Brickell Key, 15 minutes from downtown Miami but a world away. Rates begin at $395 per night for a single and $420 for a double. Web site: www.mandarinoriental.com.
Traditional lion dancers celebrated the Peninsula Chicago’s opening. A feng shui master vetted the layout of the 339 rooms, which were designed to be bathed in daylight. General manager Peter Finamore worked at four Peninsula hotels in Asia, and the kitchen staff includes two chefs from the Peninsula Hong Kong. Facilities include a business center with private offices as well as a capacious indoor pool (set to open in August). Chic shopping is nearby. Rates begin at $425 per night for a single room and $465 for a double. An introductory discount of 30 percent is available through September 3. Web site: www.peninsula.com.
The stylish Library Hotel, cheek-to-vowel with the New York Public Library, is ideal for bibliophiles in Manhattan on business. Over 6,000 books line its shelves, and it has a breakfast-room-cum-reading-room, a “poetry” garden and a fireside writer’s den. On a practical note, this very private hotel has a business center providing high-speed Internet connections. The rooms come with cordless phones, dataports and voice mail. Rates are $265 for a single, $295 for a double. Web site: www. libraryhotel.com.
The Ritz-Carlton, Washington, D.C., has 300 classy rooms, but $3,500 per night will get you a suite with a panoramic view of the Washington Monument, through the bathtub window. The hotel opened eight months ago; while it was still under construction, a German bank booked the Ritz-Carlton Suite, as well as the 1,000-person ballroom, for this fall’s International Monetary Fund-World Bank meeting. Web site: www.ritzcarlton.com.
