What am I looking forward to at an upcoming visit to Graves 601? The rain shower, for one. The Hermès soap, which sounds like it smells delicious, and is a startling deep green color in pictures.
I’ve been thinking about what I like about funky hotels with strange amenities. It’s not that they’re more likely to cater to my tastes for the evening. If that were it, I should prefer my own bedroom — which, after all, already has a completely controlled-by-me selection of pillows, beddings, available beverages, etc., etc. But this is not at all what I’m looking for. No, I want a hotel to let me try out something new and see if I want to include it in my life, whether it would make me more comfortable or more productive. I acquired the habit of taking long baths from hotels. (One jar of bath salts too many.) Hotels have taught me the value of a good duvet. They’ve also taught me that I find tiny pillows annoying, that even a good hair drier is frustrating to use on hair like mine, that Red Bull does not give you wings.
It seems to me as though Graves 601 has caught on to this secondary purpose of hotels, because they run an online boutique from which you can purchase directly any of the bedding items, robes, soaps, etc., that you may have seen and liked in your room.
I was a little dismayed about this until I thought about it more. I’m not really in favor of consumerism for its own sake; in many parts of my life I spend quite frugally, and I try very hard not to buy things that I won’t use and for which I have no legitimate purpose. But sometimes what I’m trying to do is improve the design of my life — oh, not in a big spiritual sense (though I think about that too, I don’t expect to resolve it with the purchase of a Frette bathrobe), but in the sense of having the functional things that surround me be things that work well for my purposes. Hangers. Towels. Soap. Things that are too boring for me normally to give them much thought, but which do affect the comfort and troublesomeness of the rest of my life.
Hotels are kind of try-before-you-buy lifestyle shopping experiences. You sleep on the bedlinens, use the mini-soaps, breathe deeply from the Oxia oxygen canister. This even applies to furniture and interior design, a bit: a look that appeals in a magazine or in a showroom can be different to live in. I’m not saying people don’t pick hotels they think will be comfortable — clearly they do — but just that for some people there’s also an element of shopping research. It’s like being able to try on clothes, to browse books or listen to music while you’re still at the store. (A trend that has become much more popular over the last fifteen or twenty years. Why, I remember when I was a kid, bookstores often didn’t have seats! Some even discouraged you from reading half a novel there in the store!)
The thing is — though I enjoy this sampling and am looking forward to trying what this particular hotel has to offer — I’ve now gotten my life into pretty good shape as regards bedlinen and soap. What if what I want is to try out, oh, a selection of fountain pens? How about the luxurious cutting edge in chopping knives, or the high end in coffee makers? Are there rental kitchens where I can prepare a guest meal or two?
And no, a meal assembly kitchen doesn’t count.
