Thanks to an item in The Washington Post, I recently became aware of the existense of the hipper-than-thou Thompson Hotels chain.
Would you or anyone you know be enticed to stay at an expensive hotel by the following “manifesto”?
Dear Guest,
In a world full of choices, we all need to question who we are and where we belong.
We set out to create a group of hotels that are effectively sophisticated and classically cool but small enough to provide personal service. Thompson Hotels are contemporary and elegant with an element of edge and surprise. At Thompson Hotels we believe there’s a place for refined, intimate style in a world of overly dressed up mega brands. We are not trendy boutique hotels. Our style is simultaneously timeless and avant-garde.
Who are our guests? Bohemian chic meets art-house-wise meets quiet yet radical elegance; really more of a mind-set than a demographic… “good looking revolutionaries”
We wish we had known: Steve McQueen, Bobby Kennedy, Mick Jagger in 1973, Grace Kelly, Jean-Luc Godard, Edie Sedgwick and the fictional Royal Tenenbaums.
You’ll find us watching Darko, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Coffee and Cigarettes, Badlands, Blow Up, Le Mans. Or listening to The White Album, the Sex Pistols, Sinatra and we don’t pick sides between the East Coast and the West Coast.
We collect Hiroshi Sugimoto photographs, vintage Zippo lighters, matchbooks from cafes, quotes and one day, Basquiat.
We are a tribe, nomadic in nature joined by common threads. We are driving up the coast to a life of epic adventures… “It’s an anywhere road for anybody anyhow… but no matter the road is life”: Jack Kerouac.
See you soon,
TH
p.s. we will keep all your secrets and promises
Or would you, like me, go out of your way not to stay at such a place? Would you, like me, happily stay at a Super 8 Motel (“Official Hotel of Petty Enterprises, Bobby Labonte and the #43 car“) instead, even if its rooms were comparably priced instead of four or five times cheaper?
Isn’t the last place you want to find “an element of edge and surprise” at your goddamn hotel?
