Are boutique hotels cool or cold?
In those early days it was about putting heads in beds. Innkeepers both owned and operated their hotels. By the mid 1950’s, came the brands with uniform design templates that popped up no matter where you stayed. Today, hotels are all about brands and hotel chains, where a hotel room in Singapore is the same as one in Dubai.
No matter where you awoke in the world, the layout and features in your room - the bedside table, the writing desk, looked identical. One took comfort in its familiarity when you check in, but because they feel and look the same, you are not unhappy to leave. ‘In a sea of sameness”, especially in city / corporate hotels, where nothing stands out, these rooms are forgettable.
As the hotel industry evolved, came the “new” – boutique hotels, which broke the established rules and caused a re-alignment of traditional concepts and designs. Apart from aiming for a trend-setting design the boutique world established a new paradigm in the industry – ‘caring for their guests’ as opposed to the ‘serving them well’ credo of branded / chain competitors’.
In the rush to embrace the ‘new’, many ‘pretenders’ have begun sticking the word ‘boutique’ to any building in the belief that by slapping ‘boutique’ in their hotel description, it gives them the licence to inflate the prices. Some years ago, Malaysian authorities began to crack down on the term ‘boutique’ hotels to prevent the abuse by budget hotel operators.
A boutique hotel must be warm, comfortable and its design must touch the heart. Sadly, many so called ‘boutique’ hotels are as cold as an operating theatre in a hospital.
The perpetrators of these pseudo-boutique hotels don’t tell you about a destination…they also ignore its realities. Your room will look as if it was put together by a Balinese decorator, who brainstormed with representatives from an auto spare parts store and a perfumery vendor. The door opens into a space of dark wood with harsh textured linen and heavy wrought iron bedside tables with a single avocado on an unglazed plate beside it. Handmade soaps in a bathroom with clear glass walls may be trendy but hardly anyone nowadays likes to do their ablutions when they can be observed. Just going a bit mental with funky decorating and a splash of old looking furniture does not make a boutique hotel.
Almost all boutique hotels will boast of a spa. Mostly known as ‘The Spa’ it is expensive, padded and white, as if catering to the insane. In certain boutique hotels, not all of these things are necessarily bad in themselves. There are indeed some lovely ones all over the world. However, in the main, design –led hotels were supposed to free us from hotels that screamed ‘sameness’. What we are seeing is a stream of individual properties, masquerading behind the same formula of minimalism.
Shafeek Wahab – Editor “Hospitality Sri Lanka, Consultant, Trainer, Ex-Hotelier |
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