James Innes-Smith

What I’ve learnt about luxury

  • From Spectator Life
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What do you look for in a luxury hotel? For me it’s the quality of the pillows every time. You can keep your fancy hair products, exotic fruit bowls and hooded towelling robes; give me two perfectly puffy goose down pillows and I can forgive almost anything – well, maybe not a lumpy mattress.

Luxury enticements don’t come much more lavish than Dubai’s Burj Al Arab, the self proclaimed ‘seven star’ hotel that featured on the BBC’s Inside Dubai and wears its decadence on its sail-like sleeve. The Burj is the only hotel I’m aware of that offers a menu containing seventeen different kinds of pillow including an Anti-Ageing Premium Down option lavished with ‘traces of vitamins’. After some agonising indecision I personally plumped for the enticing ‘Body Roll’ filled with a combination of pure white goose down and siliconised, hollow fibre balls.

For all its extravagance – £5000 cocktails, Aston Martins on tap and an embarrassment of gold leaf (2,000sqm to be precise), the Burj comes across as a relic of more carefree times when flash was king and more was always better. There are no mere rooms here of course, only suites with glittering staircases leading to capacious bedrooms with mirrors on the ceiling and pink champagne on ice.

All those buttered lobsters and fancy cocktails had taken their toll; I’d lost sight of my feet and more worryingly my sense of perspective

Anyone who has spent time around opulence knows that the novelty can soon wear thin. Several years ago, I accepted a job sponsored by British Airways and Hilton Hotels, which involved three months flying first class around the Middle and Far East stopping off at various glitzy five star resorts. My stay included all the booze, food and pampering I could desire and for the first couple of weeks I felt like a newly minted celebrity, lapping up all the attention, indulging every whim including some I never knew I wanted such as nightly massages and all day lobster bisque.

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