Bringing the Hotel Home: If hotels used to mimic wealthy homes, now the ideal home looks like a hotel
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.
A word on etiquette: strictly speaking, Anouska is no longer a Hempel—that identity was forged for her former career, in which she was the drop-dead gorgeous carrier of Blofeld’s omega virus in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”, a blood-sucking temptress in “Scars of Dracula” and an unlikely source of glamour at W.C. Boggs’s toilet factory in “Carry On at Your Convenience”. Since 1980 she has been Anouska, Lady Weinberg—completing a renovation project that began half a century ago, when she left home in New South Wales and hopped on a boat to England. In 1978, when the film business was in abeyance and most available work was in sexploitation flicks, she ditched acting and founded Blakes, a discreet, romantic, stylish hideaway in South Kensington, where some of the most significant adultery of our time has taken place. To this day, clients sometimes ask her to reproduce the rooms in which they began their affairs.