Innkeeping

Photo courtesy Flickr

Way back in the day, I went to dinner with a fellow student and her mother, who was in town for a visit. We met Mrs. Elder at her hotel room, and I noticed that she had brought a couple of large scarves to make the space familiar. Mrs. E quipped that she could turn any home into a hotel room in a couple of minutes.

Recently, I stayed in that hotel for several days. In retrospect, turning a home into a hotel room doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.

The hotel is an elegant and dignified 1906 structure, a classical example of the local architecture known as “early lumber baron”. I like to stay there because the furniture and art don’t make me ill, because I love room service, and because for a city visit with train travel, it’s cheaper than a motel and rental car. The many amenities that come with the room mean I carry fewer pounds on the road. The owners manage the interiors to control housekeeping costs, and last week’s room was a good place to steal ideas for my own establishment.

The beds are memory foam, and the leveling qualities of those mattresses mean that the morning breakfast tray won’t tilt when I get up. A semi-informed guess suggests that a memory foam pad for a conventional mattress would at least provide the sleeping qualities of the foam. A self-inflating air mattress on the market has a memory foam layer that is as comfortable as my foam mattress at home. In fact, the air mattress is so comfortable, elegant, and easy to handle that I have considered replacing the bulky mattress with a side by side pair of inflatables.

The beds face a huge flat-panel television screen that sits on an interesting piece of storage furniture, a waist-high credenza with four doors that house the mini-bar, coffee maker, and a series of drawers. That piece would turn any room into a self-contained living unit. I’d just as soon do without the black hole of the screen, though. Any waist-high worktop is a useful surface for the speedy execution of tasks.

The room combines the spare and dignified functional essentials of a classical Roman interior with the comforting soft furnishings suitable to the local climate and mainstream market. I wouldn’t copy every element in the space, but the overall feeling suits right now just fine.

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