As I could ascertain when I spent a night in one of London’s five star hotels, to get a glimpse into the type of lifestyle that will always be out your grasp is a strange experience. First of all, upon entering the large and ornate, yet not quite ostentatious building, finding the reception proved to be quite a challenge. Of course, no institution as posh as this one would dare have something as vulgar as a reception area in its majestic entrance hall. Instead, obscenely expensive and useless objects such as cigar guillotines and designer smoking jackets were displayed in glass cases. Beyond this museum of sorts lay a decadent art deco bar: dark, over furnished, over decorated and overpopulated with louche people sucking on cigars. Behind this den inequity, I finally located a vaguely more official looking area, commonly known as the reception.
After checking in, half expecting the icily polite woman behind the wide polished granite counter to tell me that I couldn’t be admitted because I didn’t have the minimum annual income required to be handed over a card key that could open the door to a life of luxury, I took the lift up to the third floor where my suite was to be found.
As I walked down the wide hallway covered with hideously flowered carpet, I was struck by how plush it felt under the worn soles of my tattered sandals. When I opened the heavy door, I was shocked by the amount of space, awed by all that tasteful, useless emptiness: a vestibule?! A lounge!? A bathroom bigger than my kitchen and, let us not forget, a bedroom bigger than my lounge!
I spent long minutes wandering from room to room and giggling insanely before realizing that true luxury lies in the details: the clichéd watercolors are not nailed to the walls, there are proper wooden hangers in the wardrobe, everything is discreetly embroidered with the hotel’s logo, the curtains are ugly beyond belief yet they’re so heavy that they seem to block even the sound of real life happening beyond the windows… oh yes, and the fact that I have to leave in the morning.
Photo: Madeleine Waller
About Me
- Martine Rouleau
- Martine Rouleau is a lecturer and freelance curator. She completed a PhD at the London Consortium and her research interests pertain to the negotiation of the boundaries of public art institutions and their repercussions on the production and the reception of art. She lectures in the Arts Policy and Management department of Birkbeck College and Goldsmiths College and has curated events and exhibitions at Tate, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and with the Brighton Photo Fringe. She is also a regular contributor to www.aqnb.com and esse magazine.
2 comments:
L'or de la terre et les trésors de l'onde,
Leurs habitants et les peuples de l'air,
Tout sert au luxe, aux plaisirs de ce monde.
O le bon temps que ce siècle de fer!
Le superflu, chose très nécessaire,
A réuni l'un et l'autre hémisphère.
Voyez-vous pas ces agiles vaisseaux
Qui, du Texel, de Londres, de Bordeaux,
S'en vont chercher, par un heureux échange,
De nouveaux biens, nés aux sources du Gange,
Tandis qu'au loin, vainqueurs des musulmans,
Nos vins de France enivrent les sultans?
Quand la nature était dans son enfance,
Nos bons aïeux vivaient dans l'ignorance,
Ne connaissant ni le tien ni le mien.
Qu'auraient-ils pu connaître ? ils n'avaient rien.
(Voltaire, Le Mondain, 1736).
C'et vrai. Nous vous regardons tous, tout le temps.
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