Publisher edition artwork
Grand Hotel: The Golden Age of Palace Hotels
Jeffrey Limerick · First published 1996
The great palace hotels photographed properly, with the architecture taken seriously.
Worth Reading
Easy · Illustrated — around 260 pages
Why Read It?
It teaches you to read a hotel the way one reads a house.
What It's About
The design, social function and decline of the great European and American palace hotels.
Why It Matters
It is the best-illustrated serious study of a building type that defines continental travel.
The Review
Most hotel books are brochures. This one treats the palace hotel as an architectural type — the arrival sequence, the winter garden, the service floors nobody sees — and traces how the form spread from the spa towns of Europe to Cairo, Venice and California.
It is a book to leave out rather than to read straight through, and it will change what you notice the next time you walk into a lobby that was built to be walked into.
Best Read
On the table, opened at random, before booking anything.
Three Things You'll Take From It
- 01
The lobby is a stage and always was.
- 02
A grand hotel's plan is a study in hiding labour.
- 03
Renovation destroys more of these buildings than time does.
Better Read or Heard?
Not applicable.
If You Like This…
Grand Hotels of Europe — Assouline
Glossier, less rigorous.
Find it on AmazonThe Riviera Style — Various
The coast that built the clientele.
Find it on Amazon
The Edition to Own
Out of print in hardback and worth buying used — condition matters for a plate book.
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