The lexicon of luxury boutique hotel style is dominated by eight words: sleek, cool, clean, contemporary, Philippe, Starck, Bang and Olufsen. This combination of adjectives and fittings is fundamental to a design style that has produced general satisfaction among discerning hotel guests for more than two decades, hence the reluctance to deviate and innovate. But finally, a new generation, driven by the desire for change, post-recession thriftiness and nostalgia, is forcing a stylistic U-turn, evident in a very different breed of boutique hotels, retreats and ‘lodgings’ newly opened and in development across Europe.
Typifying a more frolicsome and idiosyncratic approach to hotel design is the Town House Hotel Maastricht from La Bergère Group of the Netherlands.
‘We create and implement hospitality formulas for the next generation,’ says director, Rino Soeters. ‘We believe in total concepts, implemented with innovation and creativity. We like to do fun things in a fun way!’ This includes the sourcing of furniture: retro wicker chairs, clocks, cacti, board games, vintage mirrors and glassware were found by advertising online. Matched with hi-tech mod cons they constitute a style soup or, as they put it, ‘the best of then and now’.
The Rough Luxe Hotel in London’s Kings Cross did much to jump-start the move back to offering something above cookie-cutter sophistication when it opened its doors to reveal sumptuous comfort, fine art and distressed walls. Owner Rabih Hage describes his property as ‘the antithesis to conventional air-conditioned constancy, polished finishes and bland colours’, and even as ‘a way of life’. And he does seem to have caught the zeitgeist. There’s now a Rough Luxe Network, including hotels, retreats and an island for rent off the Irish coast, all bang on target for these times, offering a new lexicon of words like soul, raw, authentic, wood and being, and what they define as ‘the new luxury’: putting the emphasis on priceless experiences rather fairly expensive fittings.
