Recently, I figured something out that seemed significant to me. I have no hotel in L.A. that I’ve ever stayed at twice. Each and every one has had some fatal flaw.
Admittedly, I’m hampered by two things: A hope for a stylish interior, and a desire for ample amounts of the single most important hotel entity. I know it’s possible, mostly because of my new favorite NYC hotel.
The Crescent Hotel was an early failure, because of a design that allowed lobby parties–and D.J. selections–to waft directly down the hall to my room. I was woken up by two people drunkenly banging against my door in the middle of the night.
Maison 160 had admittedly beautiful interiors–I painted a wall in my house a green-grey shade based on what I saw there. But I asked to change rooms based on ambient noise from the room next door. No one likes a 6 a.m. TV that’s not their own.
I had fun staying at the Avalon with Betty, but that was more about the company than the room. They put us in an adjacent building that required crossing a scuzzy alley to get back and forth to the lobby. Fail.
Normally, I like Kimpton hotels, but Palomar wasn’t quite as good as their others. First, the location is truly in the middle of nowhere. Luckily, I had a rental car, but it’s also in one of those L.A. locations that necessitates paying for parking, which topped $20 a day. Yuck.
So I should have gone into a night at the Farmer’s Daughter with eyes wide open. But I was hopeful. It has a location in West Hollywood, close to both a good friend and the farmer’s market, where I pictured myself having a second cup of coffee in the morning. Maybe we’d go steady.
I checked in, and thought: So far, so good. The photo of the lobby below wasn’t that far removed from their wide-angle shot on their website:
Unfortunately, that’s where the similarities ended.
As it turns out, the building was essentially two no-tell motels that had been converted into one hipster hotel.
I’m assuming that’s why there are no photos like this that appear on their website’s photo gallery:
Seriously? It should, by rights, be called the Farmer’s Daughter motel.
I hate exterior hallways–there’s always going to be more noise by the very fact that it’s exposed to the elements (and, in this case, a restaurant, bar, and pool). The floors in the room were some kind of linoleum, which also carried noise…and wound up denting my iPhone when I dropped it during the night.
The Dutch have a great word, gezellig, which basically means cozy. Every hotel I’ve stayed at in L.A. is so obsessed with coolness that it’s thrown coziness out the window and then shot it a couple of times for good measure.
Gluing farm implements on the wall isn’t cozy or good design. Of course, I probably got what I deserved for staying in a place that thinks that this is a savvy advertising strategy (marginally NSFW).
Yeech.
Hope–and bad plastic surgery–springs eternal when it comes to L.A., though. And if you know of a spot you’re loyal to that’s got the golden ingredients of quietness, cozy, and good design, won’t you drop us a line?
Sorry you did not like our hotel. 8 Years ago my wife and I took what amount to a hourly stay hotel that was a sore sight for everyone in the area. With our our WORK we played off the name to redesign it.
Yes, our own WORK. The chairs in the Room. I built myself amongst a bunch of other things.
Those FARM TOOLS you are making fun of. Are completely created form Real Farm Tools. The tools obviously fooled you. They are not GLUED either, they I had to put them in using a special anchor system in case of Quake they are more stable then most things in Los Angeles.
That Lobby you point out. Use to be part of the Parking LOT before we created it. The Barn wood in the Lobby was a BARN i purchased for the WOOD in North Carolina.
Yes they are Exterior Hallways in that Building, the other building is a combination of Interior and Exterior..
Those pieces of what looks like wood over the railings in your photo. We created those ourselves and painted them. We did this because we wanted to make sure a Baby or Young Child would not get their head caught between the railings. And we stayed in theme.
That ART hanging the Lobby, in the rooms and so forth. You can not go buy, why? We painted it!!!
Before you write something perhaps you should look up it’s history. There is no Marketing going on here at all. This was all Blood Sweet and Tears of my Wife and I that stuck to a theme and created a piece of ART.
By the way that Hotel you love in NY. before they opened up there hotel ( First one here in Palm Springs ) they use to shop us all the time. If you look close allot of the elements and what not were a direct rip off.
They have long since sold out to Corporate America.
We own a few other Hotels around the US and each one we are swinging hammers and painting away.
Thanks for writing, Peter. A lot of things make more sense now.
You and your wife rehabbed this hotel. Good on you. You filled it with homemade decorations that create a farmer fantasia in the heart of what was run-down Los Angeles. Great. I’m sure many people like your decorations as much as you do. I just don’t happen to be one of them.
Ultimately, what I’m looking for is a cozy room and a good night’s sleep. If you want to take a page from Etsy and paint portraits of cows for each and every room, as you’ve done, have at it. But if a hotel doesn’t deliver coziness or restful sleep, it doesn’t matter if the outside rails are hand-painted–it’s still going to be a fail.
Coziness, Restful Sleep, Fail? Well we stay on average 85% full all year with 42% being repeats. We must have done something right.
I guess to each their own. .. I wish you well on your travels through the world.