We're accustomed to glamour in London SE26: Kelly Brook and Jason Statham used to live above the dentist. But when Anouska Hempel's heels hit the cracked cement of the parking space outside my flat, it's hard not to think of those Picture Post photographs of royalty visiting bombed-out families during the second world war. Her mission in my modest tract of suburbia is, however, about more than offering sympathy. Hempel—the woman who invented the boutique hotel before it bore any such proprietary name—has come to give me information for which, judging by the spreads in interiors magazines and anxious postings on online DIY forums, half the property-owners in the Western world seem desperate: how to give an ordinary home the look and the vibe of a five-star, £750-a-night hotel suite. To Hempelise, in this case, a modest conversion flat formed from the middle slice of a three-storey Victorian semi.
"You could do it," she says, casting an eye around my kitchen. "Anyone could do it. Absolutely no reason why not. But there has to be continuity between the rooms. A single idea must be followed through." She looks out wistfully over the fire escape. "And you'd have to buy the house next door, of course." That's a joke. I think.
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It's worth pausing, though, to consider the oddness of this impulse. The hotel room is an amnesiac space. We would be troubled if it bore any sign of a previous occupant, particularly as many of us go to hotels in order to do things we would not do at home. We expect a hotel room to be cleaned as thoroughly as if a corpse had just been hauled from the bed. (In some cases, this will actually have happened.) The domestic interior embodies the opposite idea: it is a repository of memories. The story of its inhabitants ought to be there in the photos on the mantelpiece, the pictures on the wall, the books on the shelves. If hotel rooms were people, they would be smiling lobotomy patients or plausible psychopaths. | V londonskem predelu SE26 smo že navajeni glamurja: nad zobno ordinacijo sta pred časom živela Kelly Brook in Jason Statham. Ko pa so pete Anouske Hempel, hotelirke in notranje opremljevalke, udarile ob razpokan beton na parkirišču pred mojim stanovanjem, skoraj ni bilo mogoče, da ne bi pomislili na fotografije kraljeve družine med obiskom zbombardiranih družin v času druge svetovne vojne, objavljenih v reviji Picture Post. Kljub temu je imela njena misija v mojem skromnem predelu predmestja več kot samo pridih sočutja. Hempel – ženska, ki je odkrila butični hotel, še preden je ta sploh dobil takšno poimenovanje – mi je prišla podelit nekaj napotkov, ki si jih polovica lastnikov nepremičnin v zahodnem svetu želi bolj kot kar koli drugega, če sodimo po govoricah v revijah za notranjo opremo in razburjenja polnih objavah na spletnih forumih za domače mojstre, torej kako pridati običajnemu domu videz in vzdušje 750 funtov vredne hotelske suite s petimi zvezdicami. V tem primeru »hempelizirati« skromen prostor sredi trinadstropnega viktorijanskega dvojčka, ki je bil preurejen v stanovanje. »Seveda bi šlo,« je rekla in z pogledom premerila kuhinjo. »Komur koli bi uspelo. Sploh ne vidim razloga, zakaj ne. Vendar mora med sobami obstajati nekakšna povezanost. Ena sama ideja, ki si jo morajo deliti.« Razmišljujoče je pogledala ven proti požarnim stopnicam: »In seveda bi morali kupiti sosednjo hišo.« Zagotovo se šali, sem pomislil. … Vendar si ta predlog že zaradi svoje nenavadnosti zasluži razmislek. Hotelske sobe so prostori brez spomina. Če bi bile v njih sledi prejšnjih obiskovalcev, bi nas to zagotovo motilo, saj nas večina hodi v hotele ravno zato, da počnemo tam stvari, ki jih doma ne bi. Pričakujemo, da bo soba sterilno čista, kot da bi izpod postelje pred kratkim odstranili truplo. (Kar se je v nekaterih primerih tudi zares zgodilo.) Medtem ko domači prostor pooseblja ravno nasprotno idejo: je shramba spominov. Zgodba njegovih stanovalcev naj bi bila prisotna na fotografijah nad kaminom, slikah na steni, knjigah na policah. Če bi hotelske sobe bile ljudje, bi bile zagotovo smejoči pacienti z lobotomijo ali pa pravi psihopati.
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