The Graves 601 is a new entry on my favorite-hotels list.

It’s possible to find quality fittings lots of places, and these tend to be heavily promoted on hotel websites. This one lives up to the claims: marble bathroom tiles; generous rain showers (which, if you haven’t met one, in this case simply means a luxuriously huge showerhead); Frette linens; Hermès soaps; soft pillowtop mattress and assortment of pillows.

What the Graves gets right — so critically — is the design that brings these pieces together.

My room — by no means the most expensive kind of room available — had a generously-sized bathroom, king-sized bed, desk work area, and a sitting area with a chair and a modern sort of fainting-sofa. The 42-inch plasma screen is positioned on a swivel arm so that you can watch it comfortably from anywhere in the room: none of this nonsense of putting a flat-screen television where it faces only an awkward corner. Both wireless and ethernet are provided (though there’s a per-day charge), and the hotel does stock ethernet cables; I gnash my teeth at places that provide only an ethernet outlet and assume that you must naturally be traveling with a cable wrapped around your waist at all times. Many rooms face out over a busy street towards the neighboring Target Center, but the windows are so thick that no noise leaks in; and there are multiple layers of curtain, so that one can enjoy cool, shady privacy without blocking out all natural light entirely. The minibar is comfortably placed and stocked with things you might really be hungry for — nuts in a sizable can, for instance. The desk is big enough that you can comfortably eat a room service meal from it, even though room service meals at the Graves are served on an oversized silver tray with a generous collection of condiments.

The whole scene is so meticulously designed that it’s hard to resent how self-consciously the Graves cultivates its particular style. All the staff wear black uniforms, which look — I have to admit — pretty good, but also unmistakably trend-conscious. The public areas of the hotel are high-ceilinged and endowed with large-scale abstract artworks, and — in contrast to the light and airy guest rooms — tend toward dark colors and wood veneers. And the music that plays on the hotel’s website? That general sort of music plays in all the hallways and elevators at all times: chilled and spacy. It’s hard not to feel that you’ve wandered into a movie set. But, for all that, the staff are tremendously friendly and not at all self-important. I found the lobby to be an odd place to wait to meet up with friends, but the hotel bar is comfortable.

Other positives: room service is available 24 hours a day, and the food comes from the Cosmos restaurant downstairs (about which more in another post, no doubt). This is some of the best room service food I’ve ever had: even potentially trivial dishes, like a chicken breast sandwich with honey-mustard sauce on focaccia, are prepared and garnished with real care and delivered more quickly than the delivery estimate.

There were just a couple of places where I felt the room’s pleasant appointments went over the edge into silly. There’s a telephone next to the toilet, and a TV in there too; and I can’t help thinking that anyone so obsessive about telephones that they can’t bear to part from one even long enough to use the bathroom is likely to have a cellphone anyway. Or three. I also wouldn’t have minded a bathtub, but the shower was so nice that I didn’t miss it. And coffee-makers are only by request, perhaps to avoid cluttering up the place, perhaps to encourage people to call room service; either way, that’s one thing I do generally use.

Then there’s the art, which I didn’t mind, but which some people do. A tripadvisor review of the hotel reads

And then the room, while it had some swanky features, also had some tacky elements (i.e., lit up sexually suggestive photographs of a woman with fruit?! – bizarre – I definitely didn’t feel at home!)

For those who are curious (and I certainly was, after reading the review): the “sexually suggestive photograph of a woman with fruit” depicts a clothed woman holding a strangely-shaped pear, which a person with the right bent of mind might perceive to resemble buttocks. It’s kind of pretty, in its way, and then funny after that; I really have to dig down deep to reach any level on which I find it offensive. The part I wasn’t crazy about was that this photograph is mounted to be backlit, which just seemed unnecessary, but which does fit the hotel’s gleam and glitz, and its refusal to do anything quite in the usual way.

And no, I didn’t feel at home either; but I don’t look for hotels to make me feel at home. What I wanted, especially this time, after a tremendously stressful week, was somewhere where someone else would look out for me and make my life easier for a few hours. And that’s what I got.

The bottom line: although some aspects of the style are not quite as I would have chosen them, I felt as comfortable and well-looked-after at the Graves as at any hotel in my experience, with the possible exception of the beautiful Auberge du Vieux Port.