“We hate the term ‘boutique,’” sniffs hotelier Stephen Brandman, whose Manhattan flagship, 60 Thompson in fashionable SoHo, caters to chic guests with 100 contemporary rooms, a hopping lobby bar and an Asiatic dining room. Set to debut a Toronto satellite and several other New York and L.A. properties over the next two years, what the co-owner of the Thompson Hotel Group, a former executive at the industry’s monolithic InterContinental chain, actually objects to is the label. “It’s just a marketing term. Look at the Hudson,” says Brandman, who deliberately keeps room counts low, referencing Ian Schrager’s midtown address, “850 rooms—and they call it boutique? Sure.”
Actually, it’s 1,000—rooms that Schrager shoehorned into the space generally allotted for walk-in closets (150 square feet for a queen), claiming inspiration from “the romance of ocean travel.” While one might certainly feel compelled to romance anyone with whom we shared a cheek-to-cheek Hudson cubicle, cabin-sized rooms are an acknowledged “boutique” bane. Still, you have to hand it to him. Fuelled by New York’s exhilarating ’80s art scene, Schrager rebuffed traditional posh—a Persian rug here, a crystal chandelier there—and introduced Morgans in ’84. Then he enlisted madcap French designer Philippe Starck for a cutting-edge cavalcade—Royalton, Delano, Mondrian, Sanderson—that recreated the modern hotel industry.
By the late ’90s, W Hotels, under the Starwood conglomerate that counts Sheraton and Westin in its stable, was churning out the slick with the same remote efficiency as line workers at Ford bolting on car doors. The “cool” aesthetic spread like wildfire—to everywhere but Canada, a stronghold of big chain addresses. With the Hudson, Schrager has merely taken a formula he invented to its ultimate apotheosis—or antithesis, depending on how you view it.
When “boutique” finally arrived in Toronto—in 1999—the 28 rooms and restrained palette of Yorkville’s Windsor Arms offered a welcome counterpoint in a city littered with giant chains. While it soon became the celebrities’ discreet alternative to the nearby Four Seasons, the Windsor Arms lacked one requisite of the genre: the fashionable bar and restaurant. It was a curious lapse, given the hotel’s earlier incarnation: In its ’70s and ’80s glory years, coveted tables at its chic Three Small Rooms and Courtyard Café were scattered with Exile on Main St–era Rolling Stones and such glam femme fatales as the young Barbara Amiel.
Launched in 2003, the SoHo Metropolitan in Toronto’s theatre district, a more urbane affair than its two sister properties, nailed the chic cuisine angle, with Claudio Aprile helming its in-house fine dining room, Senses (now headed up by Patrick Lin). A year later, the studied anti-luxe of Queen West’s Drake Hotel, perhaps more “art” hotel than “boutique,” catered to its hipster guests with a cool roster of live performances and a hot spot bar, while across town, the Pantages Suites, Hotel & Spa, taking the opposite tack, installed a dedicated pastiche of off-the-rack modernity and prefab mid-century riffs, then revoked what élan the look aimed to offer by stashing a garish, neon-lit Fran’s Restaurant off its lobby—a gaffe that served only to emphasize its inelegant location, a block from the Eaton Centre
and brassy Yonge Street. Two years later, nightlife impresario Zark Fatah tucked tiny, sexy Doku 15 (now the Eight Wine Bar), into the Cosmopolitan hotel, opened in 2005.
By 2006, Vancouver claimed a single stylish entry (the Opus Hotel), boomtown Calgary was a bust (unless you count the 185-room, “boutique-style” Hotel Arts), and Toronto, a city of over 5 million that hosts such glittering annual events as the world’s premiere film festival, saw its hit-and-miss selection delivered at a molasses-like pace. In Canada—a latecomer to a party that’s been raging internationally for well over a decade—excitement over the current hotel wave has been understandably palpable. In a sudden game of Monopoly meets musical chairs, the Loden Vancouver launches this month, while the city’s Opus opened a sister address in Montreal last July. Canadian boutique-brand pioneer Groupe Germain is busy adding a Calgary satellite to its roster of properties in Montreal and Quebec City, along with a second location in Toronto—a city that saw last fall’s debut of the Hazelton, is poised for its 2009 Thompson, and is now rumoured to be getting a Gansevoort.
“The Canadian market is growing as a result of the economy and a well-travelled younger generation,” says Alex Filiatrault, director of marketing for the Four Seasons Toronto. Attributing the boutique boom to increased general design awareness twinned with rising real estate values, he points out that several projects also have residential angles, with short-term return on investment and long-term real estate value in a very hot market making Toronto very tempting to developers. “It made good business sense to build boutique hotels in key locations. Fashionable hotels that cater to a trendy market are very much a part of the development numbers.”
Numbers like the $16.5 billion that foreign travellers dropped in Canada in 2006—with shopping, nightlife, seeing friends and gallery hopping among their favoured diversions—or the $27.4 billion that tourism contributed to the country’s gross domestic product in the same year.
Elegantly rendered with just 77 rooms, the Hazelton certainly qualifies as “boutique,” though, like Brandman, its president and COO, Klaus Tenter, previously the general manager of the Four Seasons just across the street, dismisses the term for his hotel. “That’s something fashionable, something funky. For us, service is everything. We’re a small luxury hotel—it’s different.” As Tenter, an affable, gravel-voiced German, is quick to assert, design is not the linchpin of a great hotel. “The quality of people and the service put the life and heart into it. You don’t open and say, ‘Well, it looks great, and that’s it.’”
Brandman takes a different view. Agreeing that “for too long, everyone thought if you put white furniture everywhere, you’d be as successful as Schrager,” he wouldn’t argue that excellent service is exclusive of singular design. While a more comely than competent staff is a fabled blight of the “style hotel,” fashion and luxury do not make odd bedfellows. “If we’re going to be considered ‘boutique,’ we want to be the Ritz-Carlton of boutique,” says Brandman, referencing a posh brand renowned for its service. “And there is a definite need for more lifestyle hotels in Toronto.”
The Thompson has opted for subdued chic with its first Canadian address. A teaser image on the company site shows a sleek, negative-edge rooftop pool allowing a view of the skyline from any of the Bertoia Diamond lounge chairs littering its edge. At the Hazelton, while the uptown, luxe dark granite bathrooms add a splash of glam to the contemporary sleek—all right angles and men’s boudoir hues—the pared-back and neutral palette of the Yabu Pushelberg–designed hotel is posh yet predictable.
Do hoteliers play it somewhat safe in less racy Canada? Perhaps. Can we blame them? Not really. Not everyone is thankful for a lobby that resembles an avant-garde Milan furniture showroom (London’s Sanderson springs to mind), and overly era-specific design has an accelerated “best before” date—Manhattan’s circa ’88 Royalton just relaunched after a complete, much-needed redo. And every wardrobe needs an elegant black dress or two before it’s augmented with a fashiony showstopper.
While bijoux international addresses enjoy a more singular and varied hotel scene—the more au courant turning away from now-standardized modern design—it’s a diversity built on a foundation Canada is only just building. Toronto and Vancouver are not Paris or London. In fact, they’re not even Montreal, where boutique hotels exploded over a decade ago, translating into an array of distinctive iterations: the Hôtel Le Germain flagship, intimate Nelligan, mod St-Paul, gilded Le St-James and cool Gault. The bustling hotel scene was capped with the arrival of a W property in ’04 and now the new Opus—a cup-runneth-over scenario that sees even its trailblazer concede some ennui. With Groupe Germain expanding, the family-owned company is exploring a new market—or, true to form, creating one: Alt Hôtels, a three-star version of “boutique” targeting the monotonous Howard Johnsons and Best Westerns scattered around the world’s airports and industrial parks. “Clients will walk into an Alt Hôtel and think they’re somewhere—not anywhere or nowhere,” explains Hugo Germain, general manager of Alt Hôtel Quartier Dix30, the brand’s first property. “It’s something new.”
If any slice of the market is desperate for a revamp, the anonymous mid-range is it, and Groupe Germain has the élan to bring to the cut-rate table. H&M in hotel form, Alt is the offshoot of the 21st-century design-for-the-masses revolution that saw Todd Oldham restyle low-brow La-Z-Boy and Cynthia Rowley do collections for Target. “We’re trying to push it a bit,” says Germain of his $129-a-night discount designer world. “It’s a sector that needs refreshing.”
Not that it always works. The InterContinental Group, which counts among its stable Holiday Inn and other generic chains of the sort that Germain looks to “refresh,” had a similar notion. Its new subgroup, Hotel Indigo, claims 11 addresses, including an Ottawa outpost, launched in 2007. While the trickle-down effect of “boutique” design and its floral fabric–free aesthetic could ostensibly only improve the market’s lower end, it’s also offered a range of played-out decor clichés for bandwagoning corporations to fumble.
Woefully executed, Indigo is plainly the upchuck of focus-group drivel and branding/marketing claptrap at its worst. Exploiting every cliché in the Boutique Hotel Handbook, locales are “experienced” by “style-savvy guests” seeking an “alternative to traditional ‘beige’ hotels.” Unfortunately, the “experience” is a bit like watching your honkiest uncle attempt rapping. I’ll give them credit for the birch-tree bedroom curtains, but eyesore bars and restaurants—so painfully off-key—betray them for what they are: proletarian po-mo, an idea effected (or rather, affected) in a “retail-inspired design concept,” and public spaces “transformed seasonally through changing aromas, music, artwork, murals and directional signage.”
Any idea what “directional signage” is? Me neither. Hopefully, it’s the exit. In a final, cringe-worthy salvo, the company declares Indigo “the industry’s first branded lifestyle boutique hotel experience,” and the hotel web site offers potential guests personalized haiku: “Downtime’s all too rare. Squeeze your moments like wine grapes. Drink in the joy juice.” It’s with-it wordplay for the hip and creative community it will never cater to. Astoundingly, someone actually got paid to come up with all this.
The research dollars might have been better spent checking into the 77-room Loden Vancouver. Under the Kor Hotels umbrella, though not designed by its de facto in-house style star, Kelly Wearstler, the hotel dials down the decor from the brand’s signature vivacity but gets it right. The name, wood-clad walls and eco-chic detailing offer a nod to nature, providing smartly rendered decor rooted in the city’s innate yen for green that also speaks to a growing trend: the fashionable yet environmentally conscious guest. Its plush Voya restaurant, which poached chef Marc-André Choquette from the award-winning Lumière, does chic glam in a wash of pale blue.
The array of boutique addresses is being matched, if not bested, by a proliferation of big international players: Shangri-La debuts in Vancouver next year and in Toronto in 2011—where a Ritz-Carlton and a Trump Tower will also rise over the next two years, marking a flood of five-stars in a city that, until the Hazelton opened in 2007, never had a single hotel in that category. Not even the long-standing Four Seasons made the grade. Now, with an eye on the onslaught, the brand is poised to launch a luxe location in 2009, two blocks from its current digs.
“Toronto is going through a renaissance in the hotel industry,” says Filiatrault. “The boutique movement resulted from a need for more high-design living—de rigueur in most large cities. Travellers have developed a taste for it.” However, in a city soon to be laden with five-stars, the challenge for the boutiques, adds Filiatrault, is remaining relevant to clients used to bespoke service, or what he calls the “high-expectation environment.”
Add to the glut of new hotels, from five-star to fashion set, $26 million in government funding to be spent over the next five years in the lead-up to the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games. Canadian Tourism Corporation CFO Karin Zabel called it “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to enhance the perception of what a visit to Canada can be.”
Um, Bulgari bath amenities? Ordering $35 club sandwiches from room service? In any case, there will certainly be no shortage of beds.
First published in FASHION Magazine March 2008
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