Adventure Before Leaving Hotel Room

Traveling this summer? Welcome to the cult-of-personality hotel, where nifty interior decoration creates an environment different from the usual anonymous box.

That hotels are no longer cut from a cookie-cutter is attributable to several factors: the growing sophistication of the traveling public; the number of older hotels that can be refurbished for far less than building from scratch; and the success of so-called boutique hotels such as the Royalton and the Paramount in New York and the Delano in Miami Beach.

Ian Schrager and his late partner Steve Rubell are credited with starting the trend in the 1980s when they began spectacular renovations of rundown hotels with the help of French designer Philippe Starck.

“My hotel rooms are not for everyone,” admits Schrager, now owner of 16 hotels, each of which is different from the others. Yet his formula has produced high occupancy and room rates and a host of emulators.

The recently reopened Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan shows what can be accomplished when sophisticated design and an interesting history combine. The hotel had a colorful life as a home away from home for literary and theatrical personalities during the first part of the 20th century.

While the memories lingered, the Algonquin had become seedy. So its new owner, the Camberley Hotel Co., decreed a complete restoration and hired the New York-based design firm Alexandra Champalimaud & Associates to accomplish it.

Champalimaud’s tactic has been to remind guests at every turn of the hotel’s associations with such literary events of the 1920s as the birth of the New Yorker magazine and the luncheon club of literati known as the Algonquin Round Table.

Corridor wallpaper on upper floors features cartoons from the New Yorker magazine, and signature suites are named after some of the famous writers associated with the hotel, such as Dorothy Parker and James Thurber. The designer also redid the lobby and restaurants in keeping with the first decade of the 20th century when the hotel opened.

There is a more residential feel at many of the better hotels, says Champalimaud, a specialist in hotel decorating. And like someone’s home, they each have far more individualized personalities.

A case in point is the old Doral, to be renamed the W New York hotel in October, when renovations are expected to be completed. Designer David Rockwell is redoing the rooms and public spaces to create “an oasis from the frenetic pace,” says Alice Liu, chief interior designer for Rockwell Design Group in New York.

Other features give the hotel rooms some distinction. Beds in the new rooms are made up with luxury cotton sheets, down comforters and down pillows. Decor includes natural fabrics and earthy colors, and accessories consist of beach pebbles, dried flowers and lampshades embedded with pressed flowers.

Even those who don’t stay at boutique hotels may find rooms more comfortable than they remember; maybe even more comfortable than home.

Many rooms now include a handy ironing board and iron, good reading lamps set at the proper height for reading in bed, easily accessible outlets for laptop computers, a VCR and a selection of tapes.

Home, of course, has chores, and so do some of these hotels. Still, they remain obliging about it. New rooms at W New York include a box planted with wheat grass and a sign that says, “Please water me.” A handy watering can stands nearby. All this and room service too.

The norm is still “the hotel in a box,” says Jeff Weinstein, editor of Hotel magazine, a trade journal published in Des Plaines, Ill. “But what trendsetters start often eventually catches on in the mass market.”