And much more too at sumptuous small hotels
The lobby is hushed. No clutter of gaudy valises. No flurry of conventioneers. No signs. No bells. The guests are greeted by name by a concierge at a Queen Anne escritoire. In their suite they find that the staff not only has left them the usual basket of fruit but has also remembered their taste for violets, which are in a Baccarat bowl, and Degas prints. Returning after dinner, they find that the triple- sheeted bed has been turned down, with Godiva mints set on the pillow and a small bottle of cognac on the night table. Before retiring they put their shoes outside the door; the valet will, of course, polish them overnight.
Such are the personal touches and discreet comforts of a well-managed small hotel. Establishments like these have flourished for years in Europe, while in the U.S., land of computer-run colossi built for a badge-and-bottle clientele and crammed with more than 2,000 rooms, the list of truly first-class, intimate hotels has long been woefully short.
There is, of course, Manhattan's 175-room Carlyle, where a regular patron's tastes—in marmalade or Matisse—are faithfully recorded and indulged on each visit. San Diego's 223-room Westgate will summon private butlers if desired. New Orleans offers the 100-room, family-run Pontchartrain Hotel, with one of the country's best Creole restaurants. Boston's pride is the 257-room Ritz-Carlton, where a houseman will lay a fire in one's suite to soften the shock of a New England winter.
The good news for sophisticated, affluent American travelers is that the increasing success of these oases of Old World-style (their occupancy rates are well above the hotel industry's average of 69%) has spurred a boom in new and refurbished hostelries with deluxe accommodations for just a few hundred guests. "Americans have come of age," says Philip Pistilli, proprietor of the five-year-old, 124-room Raphael in Kansas City and its namesake in Chicago. "They now want style and service. The message of the small hotel is individual care of people."
In Washington that word is being carried by three flourishing establishments: the Dolley Madison, a 44-room addition to the Madison hotel opened in 1978 to provide all the comforts "of a tastefully appointed town mansion," including bidets and well-stocked private bars; the Fairfax, a venerable Embassy Row fixture whose 165 rooms and federal-style lobby were renovated last year at a cost of some $7 million; and the red brick, 208-room Four Seasons in Georgetown, which proffers afternoon tea and, according to its brochure, a morning calm broken "only by an occasional jogging Senator."
In Chicago the antique-filled Tremont and Whitehall, both with fewer than 230 rooms and opened within the past six years, are doing so well that there is plenty of business left over for two newcomers, the year-old Raphael and the Mayfair Regent, due to open this fall. Chicago Hotelier John Coleman, who owns the Tremont, the Whitehall and Washington's Fairfax and is renovating Manhattan's Navarro for a fall reopening, has a simple guiding philosophy: make the well-heeled traveler "feel at home."