Rooms With a Point of View

Posted on 26. Jun, 2008 by Kerry Banks in Travel Blog

Tired of the same old boring hotel accommodations? Then you may want to consider the Propeller Island City Lodge in Berlin, Germany. You can stay here in a different room every night for a month and never see the same decor twice. All of the hotel’s 32 eccentric theme rooms were created by the owner, German artist Lars Stroschen. Believe me, this guy doesn’t want you make you feel at home. Enjoy gazing at yourself? Check into the diamond-shaped Mirror Room which is covered in glittering sections of reflective glass. It creates the impression of living inside a kaleidoscope. Want to sleep the sleep of the dead? Slip into the creepy Gruft Room, where you can slumber beneath closed lids–the two separate beds are white coffins. Looking for a skewed perspective on reality? Try the Upside Down Room, where all the furnishings hang from the ceiling and you sleep and sit in boxes beneath the floorboards.

Propeller Island is another example of one of the fastest-growing trends in travel–theme hotels. In a recent New York Times article, Mary Tabacchi, professor of hotel management at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration, noted: “There’s a whole market segment of travelers in Europe, the U.S. and Asia who are no longer just looking for a place to hang their suit and plug in their laptop. They want a hotel with interesting things to do.”

There are concepts for every whim and wallet size. For a mere $1,700 a night at the Winvian Hotel in Morris, Connecticut, you can reserve a barn-like cabin dominated by a meticulously restored 1968 Coast Guard helicopter and watch TV in the chrome-and-steel fuselage. The Golf Cottage has banked walls and a green shag rug that varies in thickness so you can grab a putter and play the course that snakes through the bedroom. A cheaper alternative, at $400 a night, is the Library Hotel in midtown Manhattan, where room numbers are based on the Dewey decimal system of classifying books (900.004 for the Asian History room). If you dream of nebulas and liverworts, then the ‘Astronomy’ and ‘Botany’ rooms on the Math and Science floor were created with you in mind. According to the hotel staff, Erotic Literature is the most requested room. Next in line on the demand scale–the Fairy Tales room.

Quebec, Norway and Sweden have carved out a niche in the thematic marketplace with Ice Hotels, lodges constructed each winter out of tons of snow and ice. Inside, the prevaling colour scheme is’usually a translucent blue. Thankfully, you don’t sleep directly on the frozen stuff–remember, these places are considered luxurious. There’s a wooden plank between the ice and a plush mattress, plus you’re insulated with a’sleeping bag that can withstand the harshest climes, which in this case can mean -8 degrees Celsius. People who have stayed inside these chily chambers claim they wake up feeling exhilirated. Then again, it could be they are merely thrilled to stlll be alive.

At Le Monde Hotel in Edinburgh, Scotland, you can circle the globe without leaving the property. Each of the 18 rooms has been designed to conjure’the impression that you are in a specific city somewhere else in the world. There are also themed bars to create the sensation that you are a globetrotting party animal. And, of course, there are theme restaurants with cuisine from the city around which they are based: dine in Paris, drink in Shanghai and then drift off to sleep in Miami.

For more specific tastes there is the Hard Day’s Night Hotel in Liverpool, England. A four-star establishment housed within a 19th century mercantile building, it aims to provide everything a Beatles’ fan could desire’from the Yellow Submarine jukebox in the lobby to the rare photos on the walls. Predictably, Beatles music plays in the lobby, the restaurant, and even the restrooms. The rooms, which start at $340 a night, are decorated with artwork by American painter Shannon, “The World’s Greatest Beatles Artist” a title bestowed on her by the Lord Mayor of Liverpool. If you want to splurge, you should book one of the two penthouses–the Lennon Suite and the McCartney Suite. The centrepiece of Lennon’s is a white baby grand piano, while McCartney’s contains a full suit of armour.

One of the latest trends to emerge in this eclectic field is the prison hotel. Last year, Boston welcomed the Liberty Hotel, a former jail that used to be filled with Beantown’s most notorious prisoners. After a $150 million restoration, it’s a luxury hotel at the foot of Beacon Hill. Across the Atlantic there’s the Malmaisson Hotel in Oxford, England, a high-end hotel featuring converted jail cells as guest rooms, apartments and a bar/restaurant complex. Its website boasts “divine dining, astounding wine and dangerously good cocktails.”

At the other end of the spectrum is the Karosta Prison in Latvia, which caters to a very different clientele. Far from luxurious, this hotel brags that it is “unfriendly, unheated, uncomfortable and open all-year round.” This former brutal KGB jail has just everything it had when it was a functioning detention and torture centre, barbed wire included. Dinner is a stale hunk of rye bread, pickles and sweet Russian tea. The bed is a hard palett in a dank cell. And you are treated like an actual prisoner throughout your stay, complete with threats and warning gunfire and sobbing fellow inmates. Just what the warden ordered, eh?