Is Your Hotel Telling the Truth?
Design Anthology’s editor-in-chief Jeremy Smart contemplates the importance of longevity in design, and shares his secret hotel habits for discovering imitation luxury
What are your hotel habits? Don’t be shy, I know you have some quirky ones too. Perhaps you’re one of those housekeeping micromanagers, deploying your pandemic-nostalgic cleaning kit to disinfect visible surfaces. Or, maybe — and I suspect many Design Anthology readers fall into this category — you’re an essentialist, spending the first few minutes ridding the room of the vast array of paper notes covering everything from window cleaning and maintenance to unconvincing claims of world-saving sustainability if you’d only reuse your towel. This information belongs in a perfectly bound leather folio, not scattered throughout the room like the work of an insomniac with amnesia.
Earlier in the year I spoke on a panel before an audience of hoteliers. My co-conspirator Camilla and I took perhaps a little too much pleasure in lecturing a room of hospitality operators on everything they’re doing right, and — on behalf of you, dear reader — what we believe should be fixed if hotels wish to continue charging such stratospheric room rates. What I forgot to mention is my own unusual check-in ritual: tapping on walls and floors, inspecting the integrity of materials and hunting for the cheap veneers and imitations that plague so many new interiors.
Recently, at one property, I was doing my usual runaround when I discovered that the ‘stone’ surfaces — of which there were many — were mere images, printed at low resolution and covered in a texture with only a faint resemblance to the real thing. What looked like wood was a warped, rapidly peeling veneer about as thin as a piece of paper. The disconnection between the real, experienced version and the one submitted to awards juries and covered by design media is widening, and it’s a problem. It’s no wonder audiences are losing their faith. As consumers, we would never accept this level of deception in other high-end products, so why do we tolerate it in our interiors? It’s time to start checking whether you’ve been sold the real deal or merely a cheap imitation, and then voting with your wallet accordingly.
I have been known to favour the well-worn and functional, believing that the best things in life tend to get better with time. And while it’s a professional obligation to be across what’s new, I don’t tend to find much comfort in most new capital-L luxury experiences. Comfort is in the general manager who remembers you, the F&B director who knows your order and the pleasure of seeing materials earn their patina over subsequent check-ins. One hotel I frequent, though overlooked for its design credentials, even stores a few of my possessions between stays; an almost old-fashioned act of generosity in an age of transactional hospitality.
In pursuit of stories that fulfil Design Anthology’s vast geographic and editorial remit, my colleagues and I spend a lot of time in these spaces — and insist on doing so before considering them for our pages. It’s something we take great pride in. Next week, the hotel I’ve perhaps had the longest relationship with finally reopens. I’ve written a lot about longevity, and how investing in doing it right the first time should be acknowledged and celebrated with the same enthusiasm we reserve for the novel. We’ve done just that, and you can read about it a little further down in this issue of The Dispatch and in our next print issue, which lands on newsstands and doorsteps in March. Make sure you’re a Design Anthology member so you don’t miss it.
It feels like the right note to end the year on as we slip into the holidays and start plotting 2026. Our calendars are already filling fast, and I hope to meet you somewhere along the way — maybe in Chandigarh? As this is our final missive for the year, I want to thank you for supporting our work and independent media more broadly. It remains a privilege to serve you. Wherever you check in over the holiday season, I hope it greets you with warmth and sincerity… and passes the tap test with gusto.
