Hotels

A few years ago I was asked to speak at a conference in New York. ‘Where would be the best place to stay?’ I asked my assistant. ‘Well, you’re booked into The Trump SoHo’, she said, careful to pronounce the capital H. ‘Are you completely deranged? Do I look like a man with a craving for gold taps and Swarovski-encrusted towelling robes?’ ‘The conference organiser has booked it. They’ve got a special rate.’ So a few weeks later a Lincoln Town Car (which after a long flight, for some unfathomable reason, is the best car in the world) dropped me in front of The Donald’s hotel. I have to say,

It is summer and the listless metropolitan thinks of grass. It cannot afford to stay at Durslade Farmhouse, Somerset, a branch of the Hauser & Wirth art gallery that serves food and plays cow noises in a former barn as authentic country folk rip their eyeballs out. Locals talk about Durslade Farm as a child that died. I think it is a Holocaust memorial for cows, but oblivious. Babington House is the country branch, and it is open to members, their friends, and hotel guests. There is a a spa called the Cowshed that sells ‘Lazy Cow’ and ‘Moody Cow’ beauty products (misogyny masquerading as irony), a restaurant and a

Q. My husband is, in a word, adorable. However, following a substantial brain operation, his doctor has told him that to make a full recovery, he must rest in bed and stay very quiet with no visitors. Unfortunately, he is still sending out texts and emails to friends and colleagues who then get the impression that he is well enough to visit. They turn up at our flat, insisting they will only pop in for ten minutes. but inevitably staying for 30. While it is moving to see how much he is loved, seven visits equals three-and-a-half hours per day. I am not a confrontational person and don’t wish to shut

The Beaumont Hotel is a bright white cake in the silent part of Mayfair, where the only sound is Patek Philippe watches, tick-tocking. We are in the eye of the storm, where it should be quiet; of the cacophony of Selfridges, just to the north, we hear nothing. It is the first hotel from Chris Corbin and Jeremy King, creators of the Delaunay, the Wolseley, Brasserie Zédel and Fischer’s. The façade is so languid, pristine and self-satisfied that it could — no, should — be Swiss, even if it was once an Avis garage wrought in Art Deco. It reminds me of the Beau-Rivage Palace on Lake Geneva, a hotel

The Dorchester Hotel, Park Lane, is a cake floating in space. All grand hotels create a parallel universe in which their guests are returned to some great gilded and unnatural womb with mini-bar and floristry, but the Dorchester feels particularly remote; has it overplayed its myth? Or is it a combination of the traffic (Park Lane has eight traffic lanes, three roundabouts, one set of unicorn-themed gates and a monument to the dead animals of war), the net curtains (the decorative equivalent of blindness) and the strange completeness of the building? What does the Dorchester, with its curved beige frontage and yellow awnings, actually look like? Bournemouth. Or any retirement

Mousehole is a charming name; it is almost a charming place. It is a fishing village on Mount’s Bay, Cornwall, beyond the railway line, which stops at Penzance, in an improbable shed; I love that what begins at Paddington, the most grandiose and insane of London stations, ends in a shed. The Spanish invaded Mousehole in 1595 but Drake’s fleet came from Plymouth and chased them away; nothing so interesting has happened since; just fishing, tourism and decline. Now there are galleries and restaurants and what the Cornish call ‘incomers’ buying cottages, in which they place ornamental fishing nets after painting everything white. (For something more ‘authentic’, you can visit

Atlantico is a vast buffet inside the Lopesan Costa Meloneras Resort Spa and Casino in Gran Canaria. The Lopesan Costa Melonoras Resort Spa and Casino — or, as I will henceforth call it, TLCMRSAC — looks like Citizen Kane’s Xanadu without the art, the metaphor or the tragedy. It has towers, chandeliers, vistas, pools, terraces, tennis courts, a swim-up bar, a miniature golf course and palm trees. It is a synthetic paradise for Europeans who want sun in November in their own time zone; it is more unnatural than Las Vegas. Atlantico has roughly one thousand covers, if you include an annexe room styled like an Egyptian tomb with a

Lanes of London serves street food to people who hate streets; that is, it exists to soothe the still-curious mouths of lazy, wealthy paranoiacs. This is the character of the dishonest age: you can ride in a gondola in Las Vegas, ski down a mountain in Dubai, visit a wizard’s castle in Watford Junction, and enjoy the Notting Hill Carnival in Mayfair while sitting down. (Other options include staying in a five-star faux shanty-town hotel in South Africa, complete with corrugated iron shacks and authentic ‘poor people’s rubbish’). It is not for me to call this madness, or to say that as funds grow more grandiose, worlds invariably shrink; or

Woolley Grange is a child-friendly country house hotel that seems, at first, entirely monstrous — a grey Tudor house in Wiltshire, with gables like teeth and a pond outside, possibly haunted. It is like a smiling wife who bares her fangs and eats the car park and all the Hondas within; a cinematic fiend of a house, in fact, but I am only reading Hilary Mantel these days, and she has the gift of bestowing menace on everything — clingfilm, envelopes, nuts. A country house hotel doesn’t stand a chance. We are here because it is New Year’s Eve. It is my 40th birthday, A has decided that he hates

One Aldwych, an Edwardian grand hotel near Waterloo Bridge, is serving a Jimmy Savile tribute tea. It is not explicitly called a Jimmy Savile tribute tea; of course it is not. That would be tasteless, and people would not come to One Aldwych to eat it; it might, in fact, be lucky enough to get a picket, a dazzling marketing dream. No, it is called the Scrumdiddlyumptious Afternoon Tea and it is tied, in sugary, monetised chains, to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a musical featuring a man dressed as a Fisher-Price toy (and possible diabetic), child torture and obesity, and explicit abuse of small minority workers, which is playing