As something of a sidebar to my blog entry yesterday, our stay in West Hollywood was at a new hotel near Beverly Center. Boutique hotels must sprout up like fairy rings following a spring rain. The present generation includes a number that we’ve enjoyed, including the London on San Vicente, formerly the Belage, which we also used to enjoy. By the way, despite usually running the other direction at any mention of culinary badboy Gordon Ramsey, I have to say the restaurant Gordon Ramsey at the 
London provided us not so long ago with one of the best meals I’ve had in a long time. Coupled with the ambience and the service, the overall dining experience, pardon the cliché, was superb.
Given enough ointment, however, and there’s bound to be a fly. It was our misfortune to find it last week. The hotel we stayed at sought to be chic in the way that was pioneered by the W chain a decade ago, and a number of European hotels 2 decades ago. In the 2 decade category, my memory runs to my first trip to Spain. As much as I enjoyed my stay at the Condes de Barcelona in 1987, I was 22 years younger then, and the angst of the difficult to figure out taps and temperature controls not being within reach of the oddly shaped soaking tub were compensated for by their novelty of design. Apparently, however, this no-longer novel design someone feels necessary to foist on the not so cognoscenti of southern California. Another clichéd phrase- been there, done that, so now any hotel anywhere in the world that is long on design concept has to provide an at least compensatory level of comfort. Returning to our recent concept hotel experience, the tub filling from a spout placed in the ceiling above it is, well, noisy as the water hits the tub from a height of nearly 8 feet, and tub sides of nearly 3’- that’s right, 36”- require something akin to running the hurdles to get into.
It might be age, but it might also be experience as a function of age that results in Keith and me avoiding concept in favor of comfort. A large room with large beds and good quality bedding, comfy, large chairs, plenty of closet space with plenty of wooden hangers (shades of ‘Mommie Dearest’), and a double-sided desk with reliable internet access. Mind you, as English antiques dealers, our hotel experiences certainly as regards to bathrooms are heavily influenced by places we stayed in our early days in England. Actually, one of the first to enter our own ambit remains one of the best. The Park Lane, although on Piccadilly, is a marvelously comfortable, purpose built hotel from the late 1920’s. By the way, it still has one of the best set teas of any London hotel. The bathrooms are still a wonder of one luxuriant bathing- one of those things the British, when they are of a mind, still do really well. 
The long, deep soaking tubs are equipped with those oversize Czech and Speake taps that fill the tub quickly, as though from a fire hydrant.