Robert De Niro and his business partners, BD Hotels, are to open a “luxury boutique” hotel in London’s Covent Garden. Currently, the average price for a room in the capital is £135 and rising because today’s hotel stay, with more than 80% occupancy, is, as the jargon goes, an experiential luxury. “BD” is Richard Born and Ira Drukier, formerly in engineering and medicine; they are now billionaires and the biggest owners of boutique hotels in New York. “The aesthetic nature of the hotel business has evolved slowly,” Drukier said in an interview last year. “They have become stylised… hotels are more than just a bed and water.” And then some. Possibly Drukier was referring to the swimming pool that De Niro “helped to implement” in the BD Greenwich Hotel framed with beams from a centuries-old Japanese farmhouse.
One of the many follies of uber-affluence is that people will pay hugely to grope their way around the black-painted lobby of a dimly lit designer hotel, manned by undertaker-suited staff, sphinx-like, snooty and clothed to be indistinguishable from the decor. Inevitably, too, the lavatories are marked by obscure post-modern hieroglyphics and the cost of a glass of water is heading to the hourly rate of the London living wage (£9.40 and in the dreams of many of the abysmally paid hotel staff who carry the cases, clean rooms, stock the bars, cook and work as below-stairs porters.)
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