Spend the night with Elizabeth Day, Telegraph Travel's fabulous new columnist, at Claridge's
My love affair with hotels started with cereal boxes. My childhood holidays were spent in self-catering chalets on the beach in Portsalon, Donegal, near where my family and I lived. Every year, in anticipation, my mother would spend what seemed like several weeks packing suitcases and bags full of swimsuits, buckets and spades, packets of pasta and an emergency stash of Band-Aids. At the last minute, she would gather the family breakfast cereals into supermarket bags and load them into the car.
The sight of opened cereal boxes in the car boot gave me a thrilling sense of escape from the everyday. It was a sign that we were on holiday, driving away from our normal life.
Portsalon was not glamorous, but it was always fun. My sister and I slept in bunk beds, sheets gritty with sand from a day building castles on the beach. Every morning, we would fill a bowl from those cereal boxes and sit in the kitchen, eating quickly so that we could get outside and scamper around on the shoreline, cheeks red-whipped with salty air.
It wasn’t until I was 11 that I can remember staying in a proper hotel. By this stage, my mother had quite rightly pointed out that a self-catering holiday was a holiday for everyone else but her, who still had to think about what meals to prepare. The hotel we went to was a country house affair in Yorkshire, and I was bedazzled by the oak-panelled dining room and the fact that there was a four-poster bed in our family room. But what really struck me was the sight, at breakfast, of the cereal boxes. They were miniature in size: teeny-tiny versions of the ones we usually had, each one containing a perfectly dinky single-bowl portion. It seemed an improbable extravagance. This must be what happens in hotels, I thought: they cater for your most whimsical desires – for desires you didn’t even know you had in the first place.
Over the years, my love of hotels has expanded beyond the miniature cereal box. Nowadays, I believe the mark of a truly great hotel is that there are no cardboard boxes in evidence at the breakfast buffet; there is instead home-made Bircher muesli, a station where a chef prepares omelettes to your specification, crumpets ready to be toasted and slathered in high-quality butter and Marmite, an array of crisply flaking pastries, black pudding, the option of some perfectly ripe avocado on toast and a pot of loose-leaf jasmine tea on demand. It’s not that I believe a hotel must have all these things on offer in order to be deemed a success; it’s simply that my neo-Platonic ideal of a hotel would include them. This is what happens when you don’t grow up with hotels: you become obsessive about them.
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And so it was with me. When I became a feature writer, first on a national tabloid, and then on a Sunday broadsheet, I was introduced to the whisperingly discreet and efficient world of the business hotel, where the rooms contained everything you needed and not an iota more. The sheets were satisfyingly starched, the Wi-Fi reliable, the television screen was wider than the one I had at home and the room service menu always included a chicken Caesar salad and a side order of chunky fries. There was comfort in the reliability of it.
Occasionally, I was lucky enough to travel on a junket to interview some mega-watt celebrity and the publicity company would put us up in hotels far beyond my own budget. I stayed in the Waldorf Astoria in New York to interview Clint Eastwood (there was a massive crack in the bathroom ceiling). I stayed in the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo to interview Alain Ducasse. From my window, I could see super-yachts moored in the harbour. In the triple-Michelin starred restaurant, I was given a velvet footstool for my handbag.
Of course I stayed in some terrible hotels too. There was the creaky single room in Hereford with dark furniture that was sticky to the touch and had a door that rattled in the middle of the night as the lecherous desk clerk tried to get in. There was the freezing cold hotel in rural China that reeked so oppressively of cigarette smoke it was difficult to sleep. There was the place in Mali, where the number of cockroaches seemed inversely proportional to any reliable electrical current.
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And then there are the mediocre hotels: the ones that charge you too much for too little, where you have to pay for internet access and the shower gel and shampoo are contained in a single squeezy bottle attached to the bathroom tiles and breakfast runs for a single, measly hour from 7.30-8.30am.
Everywhere there are bowls of apples. Why are hotels obsessed with bowls of overly shined red apples, gradually acquiring layers of dust? How long do they stay there for? What happens to the apples when they’ve served their purpose? I tried one once; it was fusty and stale, and when it came to writing my third novel, Paradise City (opening line: “He loved hotels”) I put this experience into the hands of my anti-hero, the bombastic billionaire Howard Pink. In fact, hotels feature in most of my novels. The latest one, The Party, opens with a scene set in a room loosely based on a Premier Inn I once stayed in when attending a 50th birthday party. All the posh hotels had been booked up months in advance by efficient people, so my then-partner and I stayed in the cut-price option, which was staggeringly good value and included a breakfast in the nearby Little Chef: perfect hangover fodder. I’ve been fond of Premier Inns ever since.
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For me, the best hotels are not the most expensive ones, but the ones that are generous in attitude and warm in manner. The staff are smiling and helpful. If something goes wrong, reception will try to fix it. There are tea bags and coffee sachets in your bedroom. A bottle of water you don’t have to pay for. Individual shampoo and conditioner. Stories and quirkiness. Small things that add up to so much more than the sum of their parts. Taken together, these are the thoughtful touches that ensure you feel cocooned, that you can leave your daily woes at the front door to be taken care of by someone else.
Which brings me on to Claridge’s. As soon as I walked off the busy London street into the art deco splendour of the Claridge’s lobby, with its black-and-white marbled floor stretching out under my feet like a flattened humbug sweet, I felt as Audrey Hepburn did in Breakfast at Tiffany’s: as if nothing bad could ever happen here. I’ve long admired Claridge’s from afar. I’ve been shepherded into numerous suites by harassed PRs to interview actors such as Emily Blunt and Simon Pegg on press junkets, but I’ve never stayed overnight. Does it live up to the hype? Does it ever.
The receptionist was delightful. The lift buttons were pressed by a smiling young man who insisted I sit on the sofa (a sofa inside a lift, I wanted to squeal to my younger self, forget the cereal boxes!).
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And the smell was exquisite. Everywhere I walked, a fragrant floral bouquet trailed behind me like a lace bridal veil. The aroma was a mixture of crushed rose petals and expensive laundry detergent and I couldn’t get enough of it. In Claridge’s, even the air is five-star. No wonder the hotel became a haven for European royalty during the Second World War – the kings of Greece, Norway and Yugoslavia installed themselves here for the duration. Legend has it that Winston Churchill declared Suite 212 Yugoslavian territory and placed a clump of Yugoslavian soil under the bed so that Crown Prince Alexander II could be born in his own country (finding independent verification for this proves tricky, but I like the image).
There was no soil underneath my bed, simply a mottled silvery carpet that managed to be simultaneously plush yet discreet. My suite was large, decorated in calming pinks and greys with the odd oriental silk-printed screen dotted about here and there. The flowers were impeccable white hydrangeas. It feels deliciously alluring – the kind of place you could happily bring your lover or pursue some discreetly illicit liaison without having to worry about the outside world. The attention to detail was almost perfect: a Burberry raincoat hanging in the wardrobe for me to use during my stay; a fancy Dyson hairdryer; a bathrobe monogrammed with my initials. I got all the day’s newspapers by scanning the provided barcode into my phone.
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I had a room service dinner, and ordered with a scattergun geographical approach from the extensive menu: sushi, something called a “confit d’aubergine” and hummus. Every single part of it was exceptionally good – and the hummus was not a dainty little dollop of chickpea but a giant bowl of tahini-rich goodness.
If I had one quibble, it was that although there was a Nespresso coffee machine in my room, there were no tea bags, which meant I had to go to the terrible effort of picking up the phone and ordering a pot when I wanted some tea. Given the cost of in-room dining, this seemed to unfairly marginalise tea drinkers. But it was the only thing I could find to complain about, and I include it here in the hope that you will not think I’m a soft touch when it comes to reviewing future hotels. Trust me: I will be utterly fearless in my reporting over the coming months – cereal boxes and all.
Essentials
Claridge’s offers doubles from ￡684, excluding breakfast (￡30pp). Suites from ￡1,680, including services of a personal butler, a bottle of Laurent Perrier champagne, chocolates, flowers and use of Burberry trench coats. Feature suites include complimentary airport transfers from London Heathrow.
Clothing: Anna Mason (annamasonlondon.co.uk); Jewellery: &OtherStories (stories.com); Shoes: maxine shoes (maxineshoes.com); With special thanks to Claridge’s, London; Photography: John Nguyen
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