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The Anouska Hempel Story: Revenge of the Dominatrix Hotelier

How do you go from appearing in seventies soft porn to becoming the godmother of boutique hotels? More importantly how does it take us three years to notice? Anouska Hempel, we have discussed your hotels before, but today is the first day we came across your incredibly interesting story. Let's start from the beginning. Anouska Hempel was an actress in a Russ Meyer film called "Blacksnake", which has a review on a site called "Spank the Monkey".

In the film, shot on Barbados, Weinberg (Hempel's married name) plays Lady Susan Walker, a dominatrix who satiates her desires by whipping black male slaves on her 19th-century cotton plantation. Her long leather whip lashes out at every slave in sight until they rebel. She is then raped by a slave and a half-witted mute.

Fast forward a twenty years or so and this former film dominatrix has married millionaire insurance tycoon Sir Mark Weinberg and become a leading figure in London's high society. Naturally she moonlights as a hotelier.

Blakes London, her first hotel, opened in South Kensington, London, nearly 25 years ago, and is still one of the earliest known pure boutqiue hotels. She followed that up with the Hempel Hotel, and the Dylan Hotel in Amsterdam--some groundbreaking hotels for sure.

A few years ago she was ousted or left (details are murky, if you know something comment below) her hotel company and is now just some sort of silent advisor to the company, or some such thing. Doesn't matter because in 2007 our new favorite dominatrix hotelier is back--Warapuru, a resort with it's own freakin' air strip is set to open this year in the Brazilian resort town of Itacare. The hotelier? Anouska Hempel.

More info on her hotels below.