Food, a Fire and a Little Quiet

By Claudia Wallis

And much more too at sumptuous small hotels

The lobby is hushed. No clutter of gaudy valises. No flurry of conventioneers. No signs. No bells. The guests are greeted by name by a concierge at a Queen Anne escritoire. In their suite they find that the staff not only has left them the usual basket of fruit but has also remembered their taste for violets, which are in a Baccarat bowl, and Degas prints. Returning after dinner, they find that the triple- sheeted bed has been turned down, with Godiva mints set on the pillow and a small bottle of cognac on the night table. Before retiring they put their shoes outside the door; the valet will, of course, polish them overnight.

Such are the personal touches and discreet comforts of a well-managed small hotel. Establishments like these have flourished for years in Europe, while in the U.S., land of computer-run colossi built for a badge-and-bottle clientele and crammed with more than 2,000 rooms, the list of truly first-class, intimate hotels has long been woefully short.

There is, of course, Manhattan's 175-room Carlyle, where a regular patron's tastes--in marmalade or Matisse--are faithfully recorded and indulged on each visit. San Diego's 223-room Westgate will summon private butlers if desired. New Orleans offers the 100-room, family-run Pontchartrain Hotel, with one of the country's best Creole restaurants. Boston's pride is the 257-room Ritz-Carlton, where a houseman will lay a fire in one's suite to soften the shock of a New England winter.

The good news for sophisticated, affluent American travelers is that the increasing success of these oases of Old World-style (their occupancy rates are well above the hotel industry's average of 69%) has spurred a boom in new and refurbished hostelries with deluxe accommodations for just a few hundred guests. "Americans have come of age," says Philip Pistilli, proprietor of the five-year-old, 124-room Raphael in Kansas City and its namesake in Chicago. "They now want style and service. The message of the small hotel is individual care of people."

In Washington that word is being carried by three flourishing establishments: the Dolley Madison, a 44-room addition to the Madison hotel opened in 1978 to provide all the comforts "of a tastefully appointed town mansion," including bidets and well-stocked private bars; the Fairfax, a venerable Embassy Row fixture whose 165 rooms and federal-style lobby were renovated last year at a cost of some $7 million; and the red brick, 208-room Four Seasons in Georgetown, which proffers afternoon tea and, according to its brochure, a morning calm broken "only by an occasional jogging Senator."

In Chicago the antique-filled Tremont and Whitehall, both with fewer than 230 rooms and opened within the past six years, are doing so well that there is plenty of business left over for two newcomers, the year-old Raphael and the Mayfair Regent, due to open this fall. Chicago Hotelier John Coleman, who owns the Tremont, the Whitehall and Washington's Fairfax and is renovating Manhattan's Navarro for a fall reopening, has a simple guiding philosophy: make the well-heeled traveler "feel at home."

That is also the approach being taken by the Hunt family of Texas, whose elegant 145-room mansion on Turtle Creek will open in Dallas next February; its restaurant will be managed by veterans of Manhattan's famed "21" Club. In Los Angeles the 117-suite L'Ermitage, completed in 1976 at a cost of $12 million, is drawing trade away from the Beverly Hilton and other giants, with amenities that include a Jacuzzi whirlpool filled with mineral water and free transportation around town by Rolls-Royce.

Even the large hotel chains are checking into the small-hotel business. Hyatt Hotels' 225-room Park Hyatt will open on Chicago's "Magnificent Mile" next fall, replete with a tea salon and, in place of the conventional convention hall, a velvet-paneled library. Marriott has franchised the 228-room Galvez in Galveston, Texas, a once splendid Spanish-style hotel that was bought in 1978 by Houston Heart Surgeon Denton Cooley and a partner for $1.75 million. After a $10 million restoration, the Galvez is poised to reclaim its title as "Queen of the Gulf."

The cosseting, cuisine and decor at these hotels do not come at Holiday Inn prices. A single room or the most modest double starts around $70 to $100 a night, depending on the hotel; suites can go as high as $400 or, in the case of L'Ermitage, $675. But the premium hotels' rates, which seemed Himalayan before inflation began to loop up in the past few years, are no longer out of line with what the better chains charge: an average of about $75 a night for a single at the Hiltons in New York City and Los Angeles.

When it comes to service and style, the mass (as opposed to class) hotels barely provide what Ralph Waldo Emerson thought was the minimum for a worthy inn: ". . . a little fire, a little food, and an immense quiet." Many of the small hotels, on the other hand, feature decors that may include a Velasquez in the lobby (San Diego's Westgate) or enough brass to occupy a full-time polisher (Washington's Fairfax), plus fine restaurants, valets who will return a pressed suit in 30 minutes and arrangements with local tradesmen to provide books and other items at any hour. The Pontchartrain will shop for a guest who has forgotten to pack the essential black tie. The Westgate can provide a stenographer for dictation at midnight. The Carlyle will soon offer worldwide direct-dial phones for international hommes des affaires.

But the prime mover, the sine qua non, the matchless major and minor domo on which the virtues of these hotels depend is the concierge, one of Europe's most civilized creations. At the Westgate the incumbent is Salima Din, the daughter of a Nairobi hotelier, known to clients as Lady Westgate. Din can get a guest anything from a baby sitter to a barber to a gift-wrapped breakfast in bed; she has installed elaborate stereo equipment in a suite for Sammy Davis Jr., rustled up a British visa in two hours for a Saudi prince. She can perform these feats in Spanish, German, French, Swahili and several Indian languages. Jack Nargil, head concierge at Washington's Four Seasons, tries to anticipate his patrons' needs by referring to detailed dossiers compiled at check-in --"almost a biography," says one fre quent guest, who even frets that the ceremony is perhaps "a little overdone." In the course of duty, Nargil has conjured up an Easter basket at 2 a.m. on Easter morning and prepared a detailed route map for visiting joggers.

"The concierge does everything," ex plains Nargil's associate Karina Wilkey.

"If a guest asks for a pink elephant, you get him a pink elephant." That attitude might or might not have pleased Emerson, but it does help achieve what Pontchartrain Proprietor Albert Aschaffenburg considers to be the mission of the mini-hotel. Says he: "We try to make our guest something more than a number on the door . ' '

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