Grand Hotel Destinations
Some hotels outgrew their cities and became destinations; some cities are best read from a grand hotel's terrace. This collection pairs them — palaces with a lobby.
The grand hotel was an invention of the railway, and it arrived with a specific job: to make a place worth reaching. Before 1850 a traveller of means stayed with acquaintances or in an inn; after it, a company would build two hundred rooms at the end of a new line and gamble that the building itself would generate the traffic. Often it did.
Three things follow from that origin, and they divide this collection.
Some of these hotels created the destination outright. Johannes Badrutt bet English guests in 1864 that they could sit outdoors in January at St Moritz, and won the wager and the winter season with it; Flagler laid rails to a Florida sandbar in 1894 and built the Royal Poinciana to fill them; the Riviera and the Normandy coast were assembled the same way, one building at a time.
Others are urban palaces, where the hotel did not make the city but became the room in which the city conducted itself — the Raffles long bar, the Peninsula lobby, the Danieli's staircase. These are working addresses in places that were already important, and the interest is what happens inside rather than what the building caused.
The third group is smaller and stranger: hotels that outlived the society they were built for. Baden-Baden's colonnades, the Old Cataract at Aswan, the Newport cottages — buildings whose original clientele has vanished entirely and which now function as evidence of it.
The test for inclusion is not luxury. It is whether the hotel changed what its address means.