Mood lighting and other hotel crimes

Island fever can be described as the flip side of paradise, when the beauty starts to feel like a boundary and the slower pace becomes frustrating. When I experience it, I crave the diverse environments and, to be honest, the shopping opportunities that a metropolis offers.  Over the past few months, I have been fortunate to visit Singapore and Dubai, both of which are hubs of commerce and finance, have plentiful cultural and entertainment options and well-developed infrastructure.  What they also have is lots of luxurious 5-star hotels that are very poorly designed! 

My first bugbear is lighting. Most people over the age of 45, including me, have deteriorating eyesight and increasing dependency on reading glasses. Menus, books, departure boards and price tags are all a blur without them. How annoying is it to be in a gloom of mood lighting in restaurants and bars that make menu items unintelligible? The only upside is that it does somewhat disguise the shock of the price of a cocktail when you can’t actually read it. Trendy lighting has even spread to the lift, which was so dim I was left jabbing buttons at random, hoping to arrive on the right floor.   

Lifts and dimly lit restaurants pale into insignificance compared to the real offender: hotel rooms with fashionable ambient lighting. These days I travel for pleasure more often than work, but in years of business travel to luxurious hotels around the world, I can count on one hand the number that had decent lighting for getting anything done. Trendy desk lamps that provide more shadow than light are the norm, irrespective of the hotel chain. I switched to a Kindle years ago, based on weight, but now I am just thankful for the integral light. Sitting up in bed, squinting under a feeble reading light, does not seem like great design to me.  Whatever happened to proper overhead lighting, the kind that actually lit a room but could also be dimmed for those rare, romantic moments? 

It has become clear to me that most hotel rooms are not designed for women. Certainly not by anyone who has to apply concealer or style their hair. Make-up application by the torchlight of an iPhone is rarely a success. Bathroom lighting is almost always inadequate and finding a plug socket by a mirror is a rare luxury indeed. A mirror anywhere near the air-conditioning? You must be joking. And don’t get me started on those wall-mounted hairdryers, those that only work when you keep a button pressed. Getting ready to go out shouldn’t feel like a test of fortitude especially when the room has cost hundreds per night. 

I have been canvassing male opinions, and whilst hair and make-up don’t register as major concerns, lighting and a lack of plug sockets in sensible places definitely are. A common frustration?  Nowhere to plug in the iron that can accommodate the ironing board within the length of the cable. Hardly ideal for business travellers trying to de-crease a dress shirt.  Another frequent gripe is the scarcity of sockets for all the chargers that accompany us today. It reminded me that in my business travel days, I always packed a one-meter extension lead with three sockets – a habit I should never have given up. Especially in light of a recent stay in a hotel in Dubai, where the desk lamp and only usable mirror had sockets so low to the countertop that it was impossible to insert a plug! Upon check-in, the receptionist had proudly pointed out that our executive room included a Nespresso coffee machine – although neither the husband, nor housekeeping, nor maintenance could figure out how to plug it in. The eventual solution? An extension cable of course! 

And finally, the pièce de résistance of design absurdity is bathrooms with clear glass walls. What designer thought that watching your partner, or worse your roommate, use the toilet is a hotel experience worth having?  Yes, there is an electric privacy blind but guess what – you lose light! Opaque glass would be a step up but really, let’s just bring back actual walls and doors – along with overhead lighting while we are at it.

Ironically, it’s budget hotels that get the basics right, decent lighting, plenty of accessible sockets and privacy in the bathroom. Maybe practicality doesn’t photograph as well but it definitely makes for a better stay.  I love a bit of luxury, but I will take a working plug over a designer lamp any day.