I had been to the W Leicester Square before. In June 2011, the hotel launched its (W)riters’ Library, commissioning ten authors to choose their favourite books to populate the shelves of the hotel’s library. I was one of those authors, joining Geoff Dyer, David Nicholls and Naomi Alderman (amongst others) at the glitzy opening bash.…
I looked out of my room, down on to the turning circle in front of the hotel and witnessed an eternal moment of fatherhood. A man, a little bow-shouldered, stands waiting to go home, back to real life, while his two children run round and round him, going faster and faster, giggling louder and louder,…
“As soon as you get out of the taxi I know what sort of rider you are, I can tell,” said Kevin Begg, owner of Estancia Los Potreros, a 6,000-acre farm an hour outside Cordoba, Argentina’s second largest city. “It sounds corny but as soon as my wife stepped out of the taxi I knew…
Your journey from the toilets of Cheltenham to the sands of Necker can be bumpy and, ultimately, lacking in cheer. Alain de Botton wrote of how we only need to be slightly richer than our immediate peer group to feel contentedly on top. Slightly richer is the key. Any less and we suffer status anxiety.…
Evolution is often invisible. Because of the dead-ends that are necessarily pursued in the quest for those next great steps forward, what feels like an advance could ultimately turn out to be just another dodo. A recent stay at the Palazzo Tornabuoni in Florence made me think that this particular innovation in the way the…
The members of the Club of Small Luxury Hotels of the World, the SLH, have awarded the Pangkor Laut Resort in Malaysia as its Best Hotel. The awards were presented at the SLH Gala Awards held at the Intercontinental Paris Le Grand. The award is presented to the hotel that has exceeded guests” expectations. The…
Recently, aboard an Orient Express train, I met a lady from Zurich. When I told her I was planning a trip to her hometown she asked where I was going to stay. “The Dolder Grand,” I said and she gasped. “Ah, I’ve never been,” she said, “It’s very smart!” Incongruous as this was – we…
It was just amazing, I tell my green-tinged boyfriend. Amazing is a selfish word; it gives nothing, but manages to be scattered liberally across conversation. I probably should have taken him and not my mother. Oh well. The transformation of this Georgian house to a luxury getaway was funded by billionaire Jim Ratcliffe through architects…
Bali has been a honeypot for tourism ever since the Dutch first lured travellers back in the 1920’s but it was twenty years ago, with the launch of Amandari – “peaceful spirits” – that Balinese boutique luxury was born. With the Amanresorts, what one gets is an emphasis on spacious simplicity and elegance, exemplary service…
Everyone used to talk posh. My father, a black taxi driver, used to answer the phone using the most received of pronunciation, as was the done thing in the days of four digit numbers and mechanical exchanges. ‘Seex, tooo, fwoar, fiyyve,’ he would intone as if manning the candlestick in a Wodehouse novel, and, on…