More lobbying

I wrote about my fascination for hotel lobbies for Australian Gourmet Traveller in June:

Wish you were here – but not too many of you, as there’s not much room on this brocade couch. I’m sitting in the lobby of the Hotel de Crillon in Paris, researching my new novel, The Woman in the Lobby, which is the dark, erotic story of an Australian woman who finds herself stranded in Paris and survives by picking up rich men in hotel lobbies. During the course of writing this book, I found it necessary to travel the world to check out locations and observe the kinds of things that go on in the lobbies of luxury hotels, which are not only places of transition but often the marketplace for subtle social and sexual liaisons. The research led me to New York, LA, Biarritz, San Sebastian, Monte Carlo, St-Tropez, Cannes, the Maldives, Hong Kong, Beijing, Bucharest, Dubai – and Paris, where I am now, sitting in my favourite lobby, which is not only exquisitely elegant but full of intriguing people.

I’ve always loved hotel lobbies, ever since the time, as young teenager, I waited for hours in the lobby of the Southern Cross in Melbourne for a glimpse of Cat Stevens. I learnt then that patience is a virtue and that sitting still in places where people come and go often reaps the most interesting rewards – even if it is the two-second thrill of seeing the pop star you are in love with as a pair of elevator doors swallow him up. A friend of mine struck up a friendship with Robert Redford in a Monte Carlo lobby and I know an attractive Sydney woman who, recently holidaying in St-Tropez with a girlfriend, was approached by two Qatari sheiks in the lobby of her hotel in St-Tropez and invited to go to Egypt for a party – on the brothers’ private jet. This kind of thing has never happened to me, although I have had a few hopeful teas at the Ritz in London.

Ask anyone you know, and they will have a story to tell about a hotel lobby. Why? Because it can be a stage where you play out your fantasies – or you collide with strangers playing out theirs. As one of my characters says of hotels, “It’s as if we give them a key, not to a room, but to another life altogether. ” The lobby is the first act.

Even if I’m not staying in the swishest of accommodations, I like to dress up and find a suitably interesting lobby to while away a few hours, to “borrow” its glamour for a bit. I prefer the slightly decadent ambience of the European hotels, although the Peninsula in Hong Kong gives them all a good run for their money. I like a comfortable chair and attendants who are unconcerned if you stay all day. They’re very sweet in the Crillon and the crowd that stays here is arty and diverse. I never tire of the little dramas that materialise all day. And if I do, this is Paris. There’s always the George V or the Plaza Athénée.