The Lofts has an incredibly wonderful building. This is the hotel’s great strength, and its chief weakness.

To start with the good: the hotel is a delicious old brick structure, and the rooms and suites in it go beyond spacious into the enormous category. If you are used to staying in New York or London, the sheer vastness of the space may be overwhelming. It gets even more impressive when you consider the cubic volume: the ceilings soar — up to 18 feet on some floors. In the suites, a pair of double doors fitted with frosted glass separate the living room from the bedroom, so that (in contrast with some suite hotels in which I’ve stayed) the living room could reasonably be used by one party while another slept in relative darkness and quiet.

All this space can feel cold and impersonal if you turn on the overhead lighting, but The Lofts had a good interior designer, someone who knew what to do with a lamp. Pools of light define their own sub-areas of the room: the bedside; the reading nook; the desk; the bar; the conversation corner with several sofas. Add to this the genuineness of the materials — weathered brick, exposed beams of wood and steel, the grey and white bathroom tiles salvaged from the New York City subway system, leather chairs and metal fittings, the indulgently plush duvet in wine-velvet — and you wind up with a space that feels human and welcoming.

The smaller touches by and large support this feeling. There are framed photographs of other interesting old buildings. The mugs are sizable and attractive; the ice bucket is a classy metal one. The fixtures in the bathroom do not belong to the ultra-trendy school of current hotel furnishing — there is no rain shower or bowl-on-a-counter-style sink — but they are elegantly suited to the rest of the decor, simple, and solid-feeling. Similarly, they haven’t succumbed to the need, apparently felt by most upscale hotels in the world these days, to replace all their televisions with flat-panel models. On the other hand, the televisions they do have are well-placed and offer an enormous selection of movies, recent-run tv shows, games, music, music videos… The toiletries are Aveda, the towels and linens Frette: obvious choices, perhaps, but impossible to fault.

So it’s a well-designed facility with a strong sense of style. But here is the problem: it knows this. The motto of the hotel, printed irritatingly on all its stationery, on its mugs and corkscrews, even on the paper doilies under the cups, is “A Hotel With Style.”

I’m afraid that if you assert this about yourself, you have just lost several style points. Hint: You’re supposed to let the guests notice for themselves. This trend manifests itself most impressively in the comment card. The comment card displays a lot of personality, but it’s a personality that can read as smug: it allows you to categorize the elements of your experience from “I’ve seen better” through “smokin’” to “off the hook”. After the section where they request a 1000-word essay about your Lofts stay (“Please write small…”), there is another that says “Please define persnickety and use it in a sentence.” There is, and I laughed incredulously at this, a word problem, of the two-trains-traveling-in-opposite-directions variety. Apparently if you solve it correctly you get a free upgrade the next time you stay. There is also a space to offer information about yourself, including “distinguishing characteristics” and “career accomplishments”. This last line is, some might feel, insultingly short. (Does anyone have career accomplishments that can be summed up in a single word? Even Nobel Prizes come in categories.) But hey, they do, sort of, give you a chance to brag about yourself, in addition to showing off your math skills. It’s like a blind date with a guy who would like to date a smart, successful woman, and who wants to give you a chance to show that you are such a woman, but who just can’t quite shut up long enough to hear about it.

I can see the endearing side of this: don’t get me wrong. Besides, the property has so much more to offer, in respect of the building and amenities, than anywhere else I could find in Columbus, that it must be easy for them to feel a bit self-congratulatory about that.

The problem is: if you’re going to pull off this kind of ‘tude, you basically have to provide a flawless experience in every respect. And there, I’m afraid, The Lofts doesn’t quite do it. The desk staff were friendly and they didn’t make any actual mistakes, but yes, I have seen better: they were very young and possibly under-trained, and they seemed to be waiting on me for cues about how to proceed with our interaction, rather than vice versa; they looked a bit bewildered when I mentioned that the airline had lost my luggage and it might arrive after me; they didn’t offer me spare toiletries until I prompted for them; they projected a kind of mild frazzled quality, and when not serving guests were to be found lounging and talking to one another behind the desk almost as though they were on their sofas at home.

This is indeed a persnickety thing to complain about, and I think it’s unpleasant to expect staff to be “professional” to such an extent that they stop seeming like human beings. I’ve encountered a few hotels where that seemed to have been the intention of the management: where the service was working so hard to appear professional and attentive that their dead eyes and animatronic smiles gave me the creeps, and I assumed that they secretly hated me with every fiber of their being, simply for being the guest they’d been trained to treat so unnaturally. If the staff talk amongst themselves, great: they’d have to be robots not to. Come to that, I’ve enjoyed hotels where the staff were not at all professional. The essential issue is usually whether they care about doing their jobs well, and whether they are interested in helping the guest: this is something that no amount of training can instill, because desire and interest cannot be implanted from outside, and the more the management tells you to show desire and interest, the less effective the results. As a manager, I guess you just have to hope you luck into hiring someone who really does care. Besides, everyone has off days.

My feeling about this particular encounter with the Lofts staff is moderated by the fact that I had just lost my luggage, so I really wanted to encounter some staff who seemed as though they would remember this fact, and deal sensibly with the airline delivery man if he should happen to turn up with the bag, and who would notify me when it came. I did not quite get that sense from these kids. Nor did they seem indifferent, exactly: it was more that they didn’t seem aware of how information about my lost luggage might pertain to them. What I sensed is that they were willing to do a good job in the abstract, but that they did not fully grasp what front desk staffing or concierge work at an upscale hotel entails; possibly also that they were just young enough and inexperienced enough that they hadn’t done a lot of traveling or stayed at many nice hotels themselves. This is something that could probably be solved with more training. They just aren’t there yet.

Another big drawback is the restaurant attached to the hotel, Max & Erma’s. This is a chain, the kind of chain whose menus are on laminated paper with photographs of the available hamburgers and where maybe 2/3 of the available entrees come with seasoned fries. It is a place where the service takes eons and the other patrons include a semi-rowdy party of college boys wearing flip-flops. It is a place that serves food that will sit like a stone in the gut for three hours after you’ve eaten. It is not a place that serves food distinguished by invention or elegance, nor is it a place that will comfort you if you’ve just arrived after 20-odd hours on planes and in airports, having come through three sets of customs and immigration service, and had all your luggage lost at the end of the journey.

A smaller but still vexing issue: they advertise complimentary wireless internet on their hotel site, but this is only sort of true. There is complimentary wireless internet if you are in a part of the hotel that is able to receive this from their sister hotel, the Crowne Plaza, with which they share some amenities; if not, you have to plug into the hotel ethernet with a cord (provided) and use your computer only at your desk. This is relatively minor, but I like to lounge in bed with the computer of an evening sometimes, and that was challenging in the present circumstances.

Finally, The Lofts does have one genuine property flaw, despite all the loveliness of the furnishings and fittings: noise. Now, I sleep like a log and I almost always disregard complaints about noise on hotel review websites, which are left by people who sleep more lightly than I do and who (I secretly suspect) may have unreasonable expectations. Almost all hotels, especially those in urban centers, are inevitably going to have more distractions than your bedroom at home in the middle of your 5-acre property. The Lofts is in an area that gets some traffic, so there is some noise from outside, but that isn’t what bothered me. You can hear the loud squeaking of the floor overhead whenever the person up there walks around, but that is also not what bothered me. You can hear the sex from — next door, I think? it was brief but vocal — but that was still not what bothered me. What bothered me was a persistent sound of dripping, irregular and of uncertain source. I wandered all around my suite trying to figure out where it was coming from. None of the faucets in the bathroom leaked. It wasn’t coming from the sink in the bar area. I could find no pools of water. For a little while I entertained the idea that there was somewhere in the room one of those little table-mounted fountains, and that it was only due to the sherpa-requiring vastness of the suite that I couldn’t locate the thing. But ultimately I concluded that what I was hearing must be the noise of water trickling through the exposed pipes up near the (distant) ceiling of my room. And that was a bit annoying, because the sound of dripping water is one of those things I have trained myself to listen for, rather than to ignore. I know the exposed pipes are part of the aesthetic of the room, but in this particular case, I’d rather they were insulated or enclosed in some way.

Drip, gurgle, trickle, drip.