I get asked a lot about hotels and for some time it is more difficult for me to recommend, is that how to tell someone where to live? I am very clear that we have nothing more valuable than time and, like Mark Strand, I think that “every moment is a place you have never been” That's why you have to be so careful every minute that it will be, because it won't be gone in no time. The clock is not waiting for us.
They ask me, I insist, a lot (in the Fearless Consultation it is one of the great themes, along with poorly fitting ruptures —the others do not exist—) and I try to be efficient and honest; but it's impossible. Because a long time ago the hotel (I am precisely there) ceased to be a necessary service to know a destination to be the reason why you travel How not to be important. That's why we dream of the swimming pools of Anabel Vázquez, the flowers in the residence either the Savoy's cocktail bar in the city, those places where one looks a little more like the idea one has of oneself, is it that we can not dream? I think we should.
From my heart I think that the classic guides and lists are fabulous: Relais & Châteaux, Leading Hotels Of The World or of course our dear Gold List of Conde Nast Traveler , I pull them constantly. I also think it's time to look hard for those other little things, to me (I must be older) there are more and more that drag me: the cotton cloths, the candles that recall landscapes, the wood under the tablecloth, watch the sea , discretion as a rule, the silence during breakfast , wild fish, warm sheets, objects with history , history in stone, story made experience, cool nights. The pretty things. Beauty because yes.
Da License, Estremoz (Portugal).
Hotelísimos , this new section that we start today, will go exactly about that: love for nice hotels. Spaces where detail is sovereign, places to be. They will fit here (of course) from great classics of the international hotel industry —where you have to leave the parné— until small inns not so on the luxury route : I'm as bored as you (and you) by that outdated idea of luxury. Next. Houses to get lost and houses to find (Because it's not the same). The urban and the pastoral, the old and the new. There will be only one rule: beauty. Well, two: beauty and pleasure.
I have (we have, because I'm going to ask Laura to illustrate a scene) a table full of clippings, literary notes, maps and canvases; also some notes, like this one by Bella del Señor ("the search for the absolute through love" in the words of Mario Benedetti) by albert cohen : "In that hotel in Agay , they thought only of themselves and of knowing each other completely, of opening their lives between two bonds, attractively habitual. Similar nights, tired faces, seductive pauses, and she would let her fingers run over her lover's bare shoulder to express her reward or dazzle him and he would close his eyes ”. That is no?