Tablet10: Kameha Grand

The latest issue of our Tablet10 magazine is here. Each week we’ll be spotlighting a different hotel from Volume 9. This week’s installment takes us to Bonn, Germany, a city whose businesslike image can hardly prepare you for the spectacle of the Kameha Grand.

It’s a business hotel deep down, but it’s one that’ll have you rethinking everything you know about the genre — which is exactly what an adventurous hotel ought to do.

At first glance a hotel this modern seems almost outrageously provocative. How can all those beige-loving businesspeople possibly be expected to put up with interiors by the likes of Marcel Wanders, in a building that looks more suited to an auto company’s headquarters or a theoretical physics institute?

Indulge us, though, in one of our pet theories. When the great luxury hotels of the past were in their early days, wouldn’t they have looked more or less contemporary? When the Adlon, the Savoy, the Ritz were built, all of them were planted firmly in the architectural mainstream of their time. Sure, there were Neoclassical exceptions, but for the most part, luxury hotels conformed to the aesthetic ideals of the day, not those of centuries past. So why shouldn’t today’s luxury hotels — which tend, on the whole, to be a bit backward-looking — reflect a more modern architectural mood?

Kameha founder and CEO Carsten Rath agrees with us about this, and not just in the area of architecture. “If you go back in history, grand hotels were always the model of innovation,” he says. “The Ritz in Paris was the first ever building which had electricity. The Hotel Adlon in Berlin was the first ever building which included running hot and cold water.” About his star designer, Marcel Wanders, Rath says: “We were looking for a designer who understood our philosophies to keep the technology advanced, while at the same time to be flamboyant.”

Wanders himself provided a typically entertaining interview. Most thought-provoking, however, was his philosophy on the match between the hotel and the guest. It turns out he’s no design crusader, but rather a “different strokes” sort of fellow:

Do you think there’s one big thing that the average hotel is doing wrong or neglecting to do?

I miss in those hotels a sense of excitement, a sense of passion, and a sense of wonder. But of course those are things I like to feel in a hotel. There’s a lot of people who really don’t miss it, they just want a comfortable hotel where everything is quiet, where everything is gray and brown.

I don’t look for that because I want to be excited by the world. I want to live twenty-six hours a day. So I expect something from hotel that other people couldn’t care less about. I think there is a marriage between a hotel and the guests which can be good or it can be not so good. But you cannot blame only one of the two partners.

If you don’t want it, there’s another hotel. There’s enough hotels, so don’t blame the hotel. You were in the wrong one. Go somewhere else.

Canny advice, especially these days, when the internet has made us all into armchair critics, so eager to dash off a savage review of anything that’s outside our comfort zone. And of course it cuts both ways. If you can’t stand glass and steel, don’t slag the Kameha Grand off, just don’t stay there. And likewise, if you’re not a fan of Art Deco, of Art Nouveau or Jugendstil or Louis XV and all the rest, there’s no sense wasting your energy in raging against the grand hotels of the past — not when you could be staying in the grand hotels of the present.

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