The Opposite House opens this month in Beijing and it appears awash with comfort, style and, just for fun, loads of movie references.
The property's 99 rooms are said to be the largest in Beijing, with more than half being over 230 square feet. Rooms are simply decorated with natural wood floors and white bedding--ultimately looking like a set from The Karate Kid got a luxurious and contemporary upgrade, replete with rain showers, flatscreen TVs, mood lighting and free Wi-Fi.
You know the dilemma. You're just about to book a hotel which you think looks and sounds wonderful. And then you read the scathing bloggers' reviews, telling horror stories of non-flushing toilets and hairs in the breakfast eggs, of strange lumps in the bed and bumps in the night.
We have that dilemma about Les Jardins du Marais in Paris. Please help if you can - here it is:
The website looks promising, despite the tacky music. The location is excellent for young trendies - it's on a quiet street right slap bang between the trendy Marais area (designer boutiques, trendy restaurants, cosy wine bars and gays) and the up-and-coming Oberkampf area (Arabs and Brazilians, cheap happy-hour, loud live music, fun & japes).
Tight jeans and large sunglasses are what you mostly see entering and exiting The Hotel du Petit Moulin, a 17-room creation from fashion designer Christian Lacroix on Trendy Street, aka rue Poitou, in the middle of Edgy Area, aka the Right Bank's Marais area.
The translation - small windmill - is misleading, because it's actually housed right inside an old boulangerie, or bakery. They've kept the colourful old boulangerie sign outside, which can be confusing if you're not paying attention.
Thankfully, there's no confusing the place for a boulangerie inside - instead of bread it smells strongly of a heady perfume, Chanel no 5 perhaps. Something expensive, anyway.
If it's service that spells the difference between a superb stay and a 5-star dump, then we award 10 out of 10 to the Hotel Keppler, one of Paris's little-known but best design hotels.
We visited to find out about wheelchair accessibility for a disabled man who's visiting soon, a topic that usually makes French hoteliers either squirm in embarrassment or frown slightly in un-PC disapproval. US and UK laws and attitudes on accessibility of buildings aren't quite the same on the continent.
But the staff at the Hotel Keppler were falling over themselves to be helpful, pleasant and flexible about certain special arrangements that would be necessary.
A tipster let us know that the International Herald Tribune had a round up of things from the Milan Furniture Fair and this rendering of Philippe Starck's lobby for the SLS Hotel in Los Angeles was one of them.
From IHT:
The plans for a new luxury hotel, the SLS at Beverly Hills, are to be unveiled during the Salone. The hotel is to be designed by the ageing enfant terrible of French design, Philippe Starck, with furniture and fittings made by Cassina, a subsidiary of the Poltrona Frau Group. It is to be managed by Starwood Hotels & Resorts with a shop run by the New York design impresario Murray Moss.
We are kinda liking this. There are those chandeliers we had seen before on the hotel's website and in promo materials (sans monkeys) and Starck has a thing for chairs so titanium/silver-dipped (?) bar chairs are not surprising.
We just hope those white curtain things can partition off your seating section. Not like we would have anything to hide when sitting in a hotel lobby but it would be cool to be like "this is my section." You know, like the cafeteria in high school.
But we are curious: are those antlers on the back wall?
The eagerly awaited Mondrian South Beach--we had a tour of the unfinished version back in November 2007, and we've been enthusiastically waiting for the real opening--is set to open fully soon.
In the meantime, HotelChatter tipster Michael told us about a bunch of lobby and sample guest bedroom pictures available from designer Marcel Wanders online and we just had to show you. It really does look something special.
Starting in the lobby, there's a pretty spectacular spiral staircase, as pictured above. Move into the guest rooms and you can't miss the unique design features that really make it look different to other hotels.
We love the big sweeping spaces of the bedroom and if you take a look at the same room from the other angle, we're pretty excited by its funky bath tub too.
There's no official opening date being publicized soon and no online reservations open yet, but May or June are looking likely.
[UPDATE: The hotel is set to open in December 2008 for the annual Art Basel Art Fair.]
How rare, we thought, arriving at the Claska Hotel website and seeing a button for "English." An independent Japanese hotel that has an English version of their site. Alas, it seems that the button labeled English is the only thing in that language, apart from a few other headings that also lead to tantalizingly interesting pages that we can't read, and you can't actually click through on "English"--we hope it's a "coming soon".
Apart from that problem, the Claska looks gorgeous. It's just been listed as one of the top five design hotels in Japan. It's small, just nine rooms, but also features an art gallery, bookshop, organic restaurant and apparently even a poodle parlor. There's even an online shop which sells lovely-looking Japanese stuff: tea sets, a fan, even a broom, all without ugly hotel logos.
A night at the Claska ain't cheap, with double starting at over 62,000 Yen (US$600). The website suggests the possibility of weekly residence rates too, but they probably don't get much cheaper. They might throw in a free broom, though.
It's not just celebrity chefs that are getting in on the hotel scene. Fashion designers, too and they've been doing it a lot longer than the chefs.
Like in the fashion capital of Italy, Florence. The Gallery Hotel Art, one of Florence's first real design boutique hotels, is owned by the son of the Italian fashion designer Salvatore Ferragamo. If you like the hotel and have a lot of money, you can buy the clothes to match, in the Salvatore Ferragamo shop on via Tornabuoni (aka shopping street).
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by jennm
