Holland House Library 1940

Readers browsing through the damaged library of Holland House in West London, wrecked by a bomb on 22 October 1940.

Holland House, West London, England – October 22, 1940 via bookshelfporn

(they also have pictures of the B2 Boutique hotel in Zürich that I mentioned in an earlier post)

Hotels, literally

If disasters were actually acts of God, I’m sure more of them would involve boring conference hotels.

Hotel buildings that were built from scratch, with the intention of being used as (conference) hotels, usually have a certain air about them. They’re spacy, have fancy designs and lots of light. They’re also bland, bleak and homogeneous. Despite their outside fanciness and prices, it’s usually hard to tell them apart once you’re inside.

The hotel I’m staying in at the moment is a fortunate exception to this rule. It’s got a nice ambiance. They have a bookish theme going on, so there are books in every room, high bookshelves around the dining area and closeup pictures of books and writers in the corridors. The rooms actually have older furniture rather than the same slightly-better-than-IKEA-ish crap in each room, and the artificial light doesn’t make you feel like you’re about to be harshly interrogated.

Green Guilt

These days most hotels put little cards in their bathrooms. Cards that say things like “Protect the environment”, “Save the planet” or have other silly imperatives on them.

These naggy cards then go on to describe some elaborate scheme by which hotel guests can indicate whether they would like their towels replaced (“Put towels you wish replaced on the shelve over the sink, and towels you would like to keep in the corner opposite the door”). All the while subtly suggesting that getting a towel washed is probably almost as bad for the environment as personally clubbing two medium-sized baby seals to death.

So there you are, a regular hotel guest. Flown in from fuck knows where, in an air conditioned hotel room, surrounded by several 100W lamps that hurt your eyes and make your skin look pale as paper. You’re probably drowning in cushions (God knows where the things come from), naturally wrapped in freshly washed sheets.

Anyway, the towels. It’s obvious the hotel has no interest in actually helping the environment – they care about not having to wash a couple of extra towels. And feeling guilty about the environment is a better incentive for guests than helping some big-ass hotel chain save a few bucks. But it pisses me off when companies try to play on my conscience like that.