What Were They Thinking?
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: We’re in Auckland today; we’re spending tonight (our last in New Zealand) at the Park Hyatt. I am deeply happy about this special treat.
What Were They Thinking?
Even though I’m known for being a bit of a princess, I’m not really all that fussy about hotels—I don’t need a special pillow menu, or Le Labo shampoo (although it does smell nice), or my very own butler. As a matter of fact, the one time we had a butler, he turned out to be an elderly Tunisian man who kept handing us his flip phone every time we asked him to make a booking for us—he was way too much trouble.
During our three-week New Zealand adventure, we’ve stayed in 13 hotels. It has been a lot of movement, as well as a good opportunity to compare a lot of rooms in quick succession. We soon realized that, beyond the obvious basics like cleanliness and good water pressure, the pleasure or misery of any given hotel room is really a function of design/style choices.
There are more than a few trends in the world of contemporary hotel design that just don’t work.
Let’s start with some glaringly obvious flaws:
A window or glass wall between the bed and the bathroom. A sheet of glass is not a wall, and I might not want to be awakened when my husband turns on all the bathroom lights at the crack of dawn.
A bathroom with no door.
A bathroom with one sliding door that can close the door to the toilet, or the shower, but not both at the same time.
A shower with no door—brrrrr.
A tiny little miniature bathroom sink.
Related: fancy sinks and faucets that look cool, but in which I can’t wash my face without splashing water everywhere. Dear powers that be: please, for the love of god, the water needs to stay in the sink!
Sinks that don’t have any sort of stopper—some of us occasionally want to wash our smalls in the sink.
The worst of sink problems, though, is the sink that doesn’t have a mixer tap OR a stopper. I recently had to lean into the shower to wash my face before bed, and got sopping wet, which was not my intention.
A shower that is open to the outdoors—these are common in trendy hotels in tropical countries, usually carefully decorated with plants and stylish rock gardens and water features, and they always make me worry that I’m going to finish my shower with clean hair and a fresh crop of mosquito bites.
A room with no drawers or other storage. That room looks minimalist and streamlined—until we walk in with our suitcases and backpacks. Then it just looks like a tripping hazard.
A comforter or duvet that isn’t wide enough to hang over the edges of the bed. The bed looks like a naked cake, with no frosting on the sides. It’s just sloppy—and inadequate. Who wants a half-dressed cake?
A comforter that tucks in like an elasticized fitted sheet; you can’t really untuck it. A couple of days ago I started having foot cramps, and realized they were caused by sleeping under a comforter that was forcing my toes to curl under.
There should always be a plug near a mirror, and a hair dryer that works with that plug. Preferably (but not essentially) in the bathroom.
The bathroom should have some kind of counter space. Once I had to ask for an extra desk chair; I put it in the bathroom, so there’d be somewhere to put my moisturizer and deodorant.
Wooden showers look quaint and rustic, but they will always feel waterlogged.
Only tangentially related: once we stayed in a charming, hand-built lodge with beautifully crafted wooden floors—but the split logs were turned wrong way up, so we were walking on the rounded side. It was kind of a disaster.
Nowadays, most rooms contain a multitude of tiny LED lights, in various devices. Sometimes there are lights on the television, the air-conditioner, the telephone, the bedside clock, the iPhone dock, and the smoke detector. I lie in bed tossing and turning, trying to sleep while reds and blues and greens nudge at my wakeful brain, and Lee says helpful things like, “You can’t see the lights if you close your eyes,” (not true), or “Put a pillow over your head.” Electrical tape helps (for covering the lights, not the snarky spouse), but periodically my stash runs out, and I have no idea how to say ‘electrical tape’ in any language other than English.
I’m constantly tripping and stubbing my toes on random thresholds in unfamiliar rooms, usually in the dark. (Admittedly, sometimes a threshold is part of a bomb-proof door—this is the only circumstance in which such an obstacle is acceptable.)
The hair dryer needs to work properly. I once went to the front desk to report a malfunctioning hair dryer, only to be told that I was the problem: if the hair dryer stopped working, it was because it got too close to my head. “It’s for your own safety.”
Bullshit. I’ve been blow-drying my hair for forty years or more, and I’ve never once caught my head on fire.
Can we please be done with furry/shaggy/fuzzy throw blankets artistically arranged across the foot of the bed? They’re fine in a private, personal space, but I don’t want them in my hotel room. I’m currently side-eyeing something that resembles Chewbacca, and it is not a good look for a bed.
Refrigerators that turn off when you remove the key from the electricity slot are not actually refrigerators. The whole point of refrigeration is to keep things cold, not repeatedly cool them down a bit, then allow them to warm up again.
One of the most perplexing things, though, is when the bathroom door opens inward, into a space so small that we have to step into the shower in order to close the door.
Are you listening, hotel style people? Maybe try using the rooms you design before you turn them loose on the world.
Take care,
Lisa
P.S. Thanks for reading, and feel free to share. If you have feedback, I’d love to hear it. And if someone forwarded this to you, thank them for me, and go to https://bookwoman.com/ to subscribe.