The public's appetite for new and excitingly designed hotels is insatiable. Never before have hotels been so earnestly responsive to the zeitgeist. How else can we explain the latest trends in design which at one extreme increasingly blur the border between lodging, lifestyle and living theatre, and at the other seek to reinvent the more discreet manners and style of the grand hotels of the late 19th century? 21st-Century Hotel highlights the latest examples of these trends and more as the international hotel sector finds newer and more imaginative ways to invent and reinvent itself in order to match the mood of the moment. A large-format bible of style for architects and interior designers, this book outlines the very latest developments in types of hotel design and then showcases the best on international scene through five themed chapters. It features forty six unusual

For the first time, Hotel Revolution draws together the new concepts of luxury that are central to 21st-century life, highlighting radical, exciting and exquisite designs that leave the now diluted concept of the boutique hotel in their wake. Hotel design has reached a new peak of innovation in recent years, providing a prism for our understanding of culture, style and desire. Using beautiful photographs, Howard Watson reassesses the diversity of hotel design in the wake of the rise of the boutique hotel, exploring new projects from many of the world’s greatest designers and architects. The cultural importance of hotel design has never been greater, becoming the mirror to our aspirations and the fulcrum for innovation in architecture and design. With a blossoming interest in eco-resorts, spas and retreats, we now see hotels as both the leaders of style and as the antidote to the negative aspects of modern life. Karim Rashid, Marcel Wanders, Antonio Citterio, Philippe Starck, Matteo Thun, Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid, David Chipperfield, GRAFT and many other inspirational designers have taken on the challenge. They have created gorgeous hotels that shock and delight. From converted boulangeries and convents to micro hotels to country retreats and eastern spas, the designers have delivered…with style. Featured hotels include: Hotel Puerta América, Madrid Hotel on Rivington, New York Semiramis, Athens Virgilius Mountain Resort, South Tyrol Zetter, London Lute Suites, Ouderkerk North Island, Seychelles Bulgari Hotel, Milan Faena Hotel + Universe, Buenos Aires Hôtel du Petit Moulin, Paris Uma Paro, Bhutan YOtel, prototype

From the acclaimed Rick Moody, a darkly comic portrait of a man who comes to life in the most unexpected of ways: through his online reviews. Reginald Edward Morse is one of the top reviewers on RateYourLodging.com, where his many reviews reveal more than just details of hotels around the globe -- they tell his life story. The puzzle of Reginald's life comes together through reviews that comment upon his motivational speaking career, the dissolution of his marriage, the separation from his beloved daughter, and his devotion to an amour known only as "K." But when Reginald disappears, we are left with the fragments of a life -- or at least the life he has carefully constructed -- which writer Rick Moody must make sense of. An inventive blurring of the lines between the real and the fabricated, Hotels of North America demonstrates Moody's masterly ability to push the bounds of the novel.

A sweeping work of historical fiction from the New York Times–bestselling author Dominic Smith, The Electric Hotel is a spellbinding story of art and love. For more than thirty years, Claude Ballard has been living at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel. A French pioneer of silent films who started out as a concession agent for the Lumière brothers, the inventors of cinema, Claude now spends his days foraging for mushrooms in the hills of Los Angeles and taking photographs of runaways and the striplings along Sunset Boulevard. But when a film history student comes to interview Claude about The Electric Hotel—the lost masterpiece that bankrupted him and ended the career of his muse, Sabine Montrose—the past comes surging back. In his run-down hotel suite, the ravages of the past are waiting to be excavated: celluloid fragments in desperate need of restoration, as well as Claude’s memories of the woman who inspired and beguiled him. The Electric Hotel is a portrait of a man entranced by the magic of moviemaking, a luminous romance, and a whirlwind trip through early cinema. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.

"This volume aims to offer architects, interior designers and hotel owners - as well as those with a more general interest in the use of interior design detail to create a particular atmosphere or living experience - a valuable insight into the what, why and how of current design directions for hotels across the globe. Identifying ten hotel types that have been conceived within the last ten years, it features text, plans and detailed photography of a selection of hotels of each type, as well as interviews with some of the key figures involved. With examples of hotels in major cities and resorts worldwide - from London, Paris and New York to locations in Japan, Egypt and Lebanon - it gives a complete picture of the creativeness and imaginativeness of hotel interior design at the beginning of the 21st century."--BOOK JACKET.

During the first three decades of the 20th century, Detroit's Washington Boulevard was transformed from a minor backstreet into a major commercial and social center. Three brothers named Book dreamed that Washington Boulevard would become "the Fifth Avenue of the Midwest." It was through their efforts, as well as those of businessmen like E.M. Statler, that the dream became a reality. The two fundamental developments that anchored this dream were the massive Statler and Book-Cadillac Hotels. Between the 1920s and 1960s, Detroit's finest hotels fiercely competed with one another for the lion's share of tourist, convention, business, and dining traffic. This book serves as a comparative study of the Book-Cadillac and Statler Hotels of Detroit, and their impact on the development of Washington Boulevard. Here you will find the story of these two legendary institutions, illustrated with over 180 photographs from the Burton Historical Collection, Manning Brothers, the Walter Reuther Library, and private collections.

The hotel that I love like a fatherland is situated in one of the great port cities of Europe, and the heavy gold Antiqua letters in which its banal name is spelled out shining across the roofs of the gently banked houses are in my eye metal flags, metal bannerets that instead of fluttering shine out their greeting. In the 1920s and 30s, Joseph Roth travelled extensively in Europe, leading a peripatetic life living in hotels and writing about the towns through which he passed. Incisive, nostalgic, curious and sharply observed - and collected together here for the first time - his pieces paint a picture of a continent racked by change yet clinging to tradition. From the 'compulsive' exercise regime of the Albanian army, the rickety industry of the new oil capital of Galicia, and 'split and scalped' houses of Tirana forced into modernity, to the individual and idiosyncratic characters that Roth encounters in his hotel stays, these tender and quietly dazzling vignettes form a series of literary postcards written from a bygone world, creeping towards world war.