Category: Luxury

Wow! A Gehry Hotel

I have now translated posts from the Dutch language Weekendhotel Weblog that I co author June, 2004 up to June, 2006 and will continue translating, but so much is happening that I have to continue posting in real time and slow down the translating.

No better restart than with this Spanish Luxury Collection Hotel Marques De Riscal in Elciego, 110 km south east of Bilbao.

WOW2

It is located in the middle of a vineyard. Frank O. Gehry is said taking the commission only after having tasted a superb 1929 (his year of birth) Marques De Riscal in the cave of the oldest and probably most prestigious winery of the Rioja appellation about eight years ago. The opening done by The King of Spain, it features 43 suites at an US $88 mio investment. It includes a wine therapy spa, an exhibition area, wine tasting rooms and a restaurant.

Thanks to:USA Today

Last edited by GJE on December 3, 2011 at 11:22 pm

Hip Hotels online

Hip Hotels

When you try to research cosmopolitan Herbert Ypma on line, it is hard to find something else about him than the introductions to his world famous series of Hip Hotels Books on book sellers sites (or have a look at this transcript of a chat with him on USA Today). It is a Dutchman who has lived on several continents and who has visited, photographed and reviewed a myriad of hotels and possibly invented the already too much used and therefor maybe obsolete term “Hip Hotel” where HIP stands for Highly Individual Places.
I found is site Hip Hotels.com. Many nice views of hotels he visited, but yet no personal information.

I take it that he lives by the motto “a picture is worth a thousand words”…

Thanks, Paul

A Luxury Travel Blog

Shortly after stumbling on A Luxury Travel Blog and mentioning it on weekendhotel here – which post I translated today with its original time stamp, in line with my policy to use the original timestamps of the Dutch posts to give the reader my historic perspective here – I invited Paul Johnson to come over and visit our small luxury hotel Haagsche Suites for a special feature that he gracefully published here.

While he visited us with his DW (DW is chat language for Dear Wife), my DW asked me: “Why don’t we do what they do: Visiting nice places, having fun, and reviewing them?” I realized that we were doing this already from time to time for quite some time, only I didn’t publish about our adventures lacking a forum. Subsequently I discussed this idea in an attempt to find some common grounds (and a forum) with Willem who appears far to busy with managing his site Weekendhotel than to expand too rapidly in other countries than say Germany and France and maybe UK and Spain for the moment.

This led me to start this English language site, albeit not until an interview with Danny Hanush of Special Hotels in a Dutch glossy magazine inspired me to use the “Happy” part in the name and the motto.

Now Paul honoured me with another intro to Happy Hotelier here. So, thank you, Paul for triggering all this.

Publishing in English about The Netherlands, about some of its fantastic accommodations brought together by Willem and in dire need to be translated fully in the English language and about the Hague in particular as a neglected travel destination is a dire necessity to my view. Such in addition to my other aims. Not because the English are too lazy as Paul suggests, but because Dutch is a difficult language for any non-Dutch and because I am not able to come to speed in for instance French, Spanish, Italian or German, to name a few languages. This said I will research the possibilities to use some translation tools that I have seen somewhere on a Blog that enables the reader to translate posts on a Blog simultaneously.

So off I am at full speed to satisfy my own curiosity and that of our foreign friends.

Anti Cool: Ian Schrager again on a new tack

Ian Schrager

I am not sure whether now 60 years young New Yorker Ian Schrager is into yachts and yachting, but I do know for sure that Philippe Starck is (as is the other famous hotel creator Anouska Hempel, or Lady Weinberg). Ian has created a couple of hotels together with Philippe Starck. Hence the title.

In any case Schrager is a man of theater and renewing concepts and slogans.

In the seventies and eighties he creates renowned nightclubs, studio 54 and Palladium, where the rich and famous repose themselves. There the DJ phenomenon is born.

Then he changes tack and starts in hotels:

In 1984:

  • He opens Morgans in New York city, “Home away from Home”,
  • He sets up the Ian Schrager Hotel Group, now known as the Morgans Hotel Group.

I think Morgans was the first “Boutique” hotel.

Then, together with Philippe Starck,:

  • Royalton, NYC, “Hotel as Theater” that at the same time put Philippe Starck on the map as a hotel designer,
  • Hudson, NYC, “Hotel as Lifestyle”,
  • Sanderson, London, “Lavish Urban Spa”,
  • Sint Martenslane, London, “Urban Resort Reinvented”,
  • Mondrian, West Hollywood (LA), “Sophisticated modern Urban Resort” and
  • Delano South Beach, Miami, “Casual Chic Urban Resort”

In the middle of 2005 Schrager resigns a as CEO of Morgans Hotel Group, but remains tied with is as a consultant with a lucrative consulting contract (use of a luxurious private jet, a luxurious car, a luxurious secretary and free stays at the (then) 9 hotels of the group) and as a shareholder(?). The group comes in a financial dip due to 9/11 and the fact that mega hotel consortia start fighting themselves into the market for the hip and famous guests. Up to and including 2005 Morgans Hotel Group reports heavy loses. The first six-month period of 2006 after a financial reorganization with an IPO the results improve. The involvement of Schrager after the financial reorganization is not entirely clear.

However, recently, through his new Ian Schrager Company, and again on a new tack, Ian Schrager avails of one of the newest design hotels which recently was opened in New York city: Gramercy Park Hotel.

Gramercy 01

Now not the tight chic and sometimes contrary of Philippe Starck, but the “Anti Cool”, “Bohemian Eclectic” of Julian Schnabel, painter, sculptor, film director and musician. According to Schrager it became time for something else then the many times copied and now obsolete “Boutique Hotel”, “home Away From home”, “hip” etc.. Well, if you look well to the copper nails of the chair he is seated on, the style has something of Garcia’s Costes, L’Hotel and LeMeridien Des Indes….the style en vogue between roughly 1850 and 1890….a style which, here in the Netherlands, we simply call “Eclectic”…..

Moreover he now is heavily involved in developing very luxuriously apartments. One project is being developped next to the Gramercy park hotel. The owners of the very luxurious and expensive apartments can, if they want, use the hotel facilities. A phenomenon that we see also at other larger hotels.

When I listened to the his voice in an interview about his condo developments, I inadvertently have to think of The Godfather…

Funny to see Ian undergo the reverse development, from nightclub owner to hotelier to property tycoon, when it is usually the other way around: a property tycoon getting involved in the hotel business.

Last edited December 16, 2016

Bath with a view

Japan Hyatt

A bathroom in a suite of the Seoul Park Hyatt in South Korea gives this variation on the theme “A Room with a View”.

Apparently the rather puritan journalist who coined it The Best place to get naked in Time Asia is more concerned whether you can be seen from the outside on this umpteenth floor than he can enjoy the freedom of presiding in your Adam’s costume here.