Monocle magazine is more than a little precious. Plus, they don’t make all their magazine content available online, even months later, which is just so very Conde Nasty.
But they provide steady employment to Alain de Botton, who–while equally precious–is also someone I’m an admitted fan of. In Monocle’s hospitality-themed issue, he has a brilliant essay on what hoteliers target.
“Too many hotels still fail to understand how human beings actually function. Notoriously, they get the light-switches wrong, they forget how disoriented we already are by the time we walk into a room and hence how very short-tempered we will be about a bedside lamp that doesn’t turn on easily or a phone cord that doesn’t stretch across the bed.
Hoteliers also routinely forget the fact that we are creatures with ears. They design in a visual rather than an auditory way. They forget that the experience of an expensive room will be ravaged by a strange clicking sound from near the window or the cascade of a neighbour’s shower at 03:00. The world is still waiting for the Silent Hotel, perhaps also known as the Proust Hotel in honour of the notoriously noise-sensitive French novelist, a hotel that would guarantee not a single click from dusk ’til dawn.”
I would stay at the Silent Hotel. I would be its Facebook fan. I would have a frequent-guest card, and tell all my friends about it. I would be its customer for life.
Noise was what turned me away from the boutique-hotel thing. The Crescent Hotel, in L.A., kicked off my conversion when they set up a DJ’s turntable in their lobby–three doors down from my room, and what felt like directly next to the air vent over my bed.
Hoteliers, keep your 1 billion thread-count sheets (even if it is, as Aziz Ansari says, like sleeping in lotion). What I want from a hotel is silence, the blissful ignorance of what time the cleaning staff fires up their vacuums in the morning.
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