If American whiskey was an iconic actor it would be Clint Eastwood: honest, strong, deceptively simple but full of surprises. I recently took to the road on the American Whiskey Trail. The trail is an initiative organized by the Distilled Spirits Council of America (www.discus.org) to promote the experience of drinking whiskey at the source [...]
Continue Reading
The St. Ermin’s Hotel Reopens: Luxe London Digs With A Sexy, Spy-Centric Past
This spring I stayed at Nashville’s Hutton Hotel—a sleek boutique that brought a new level of sophistication to Tennessee’s music city when it opened two years ago. The Hutton’s owner/managers, Amerimar, have now turned their hand to the historic St. Ermin’s Hotel in London’s Westminister, reopening it after a 30 million pound makeover, just in [...]
Continue Reading
Venice: Sea and Sky
Last year’s infamous but gorgeous looking flop, The Tourist had three things going for it: the beauty of Venice set off by the beauty of both Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp. Key scenes of the film were set in one my favorite Venetian palace hotels—the Danieli. Although the Danieli looked marvelous, it seemed an oversight [...]
Continue Reading
Hotel Bling: London’s New Corinthia Hotel
Hotels have become the newest and most luxurious of flaunt-able accessories. Fashion houses, celebrities and the anonymous super rich want to own them and the rest of us just want to say we’ve stayed there. London’s newest and most fashionable hotel bling is Whitehall’s Corinthia Hotel: a shiny new bauble of a five star property [...]
Continue Reading
Anne Sémonin Spa Opens at Cliveden House
A recent stay at Glasgow’s Blythswood Square hotel introduced me to Anne Sémonin, the Paris-based brand of spa and beauty products based on exquisitely scented natural oils. I fell in love with the Sémonin soaps, shampoos and body crèmes in the Blythswood’s suite and yes, I admit I took a small cache of them home [...]
Continue Reading
Lausanne’s Beau Rivage Palace: Coco Chanel (and pooch) Slept Here
Ever since Audrey Tautou played Mademoiselle C. in Coco Before Chanel and then starred in the best travel porn commercial ever (for Chanel parfum on the Orient Express, no less), I’ve been fascinated by Coco and her travels. In the last years of her life, Coco preferred the cooler climes of Lausanne to her native [...]
Continue Reading
“Anglo-Saxon Hoard: Gold From England’s Dark Ages” at the National Geographic Museum, Washington, D.C.
If intervention TV was around in England’s Dark Ages, they might have focused on episode of “Hoarders” on the Anglo-Saxons. Unlike denizens of the popular show, however, what the ancient English were hoarding was golden–literally. The “Staffordshire Hoard,” is the largest and most valuable stash of Anglo-Saxon treasure. At a price tag of 3.85 million [...]
Continue Reading
NASA Says “Look North” This Winter
After the media paranoia connected with NASA’s recent space junk dump, the agency has a kinder, gentler prediction for heavenly bodies this winter. The agency is predicting that a surge of solar flares will make the Northern Lights stronger and brighter than at any time in the past 50 years. For those of you who [...]
Continue Reading
Legendary Mayfair Hotel, Dukes gets an Overdue Makeover
Dukes Hotel in London has always been one of those well-kept secrets that the super-posh never like to spill. Sequestered in a private enclave behind some tony old buildings in Mayfair, it feels very much like one of those old gentleman’s clubs where the landed gentry would go to drink expensive whiskeys and read the [...]
Continue Reading
Tea in the Sahara at La Mamounia’s New Luxe Hamman
The Mamounia Hotel is one of my favorite Grand Hotels—a hotel that came into its own from the 1930s to the 1950s when Winston Churchill found a refuge here after the war and spent weeks painting roses in the hotel’s legendary gardens. Even prior to designer Jacques Garcia’s extensive style overhaul, visiting the Mamounia and [...]
Continue Reading
Black Swan’s Benjamin Millepied Air France Ad Vs. BA’s History Lesson
Natalie Portman’s baby’s father, French dancer Benjamin Millepied (whose name funnily enough means “thousand feet” in French) is putting his famous feet in the service of Air France and it’s new advertising campaign, “Making the sky the best place on Earth.” The one minute advert was choreographed by Angelin Preljocaj, the Provence-based balletic wunderkind and [...]
Continue Reading
London Fish Tale
While in London learning all about sold out hotels and hard-to-get Olympics passes, I got an insider tip about a fabulous fish factory that was cheek-by-jowl to the Olympics Stadium. I whipped out my Oyster Card, hopped the Tube and found myself in the new Games zone: an area of former factories and stevedore sites, [...]
Continue Reading
London Live at the Hive
I’m live from London reporting from the newly minted St. Ermin’s Hotel in Westminster. The hotel has just had a multi-million pound facelift but one of the most unusual new additions is the sustainable beehive on the roof–a live hive that is buzzing with thousands of honey-making bees working hard to bring in a harvest [...]
Continue Reading
You Can’t Keep a Good Bunny Down: 45 Park Lane Debuts This September in Playboy Club’s Old Digs
All my editors love The Dorchester. My editors at big tabloid newspapers love it. My editors at trend-forward design publications love it, too. What’s not to love? Lady Gaga, Johnny Depp and Britney Spears all agree, there’s nothing nicer in all of London than curling up in a fluffy white bathroom in your suite at [...]
Continue Reading
A Foodie Summer in Maine
Why do well-heeled foodies flock to Maine in the summer like Canada geese on the wing? What is it about that laid back state that attracts gourmands in the summer months when you can’t swim in the freezing water and the beaches are rocky and scenic rather than sandy and warm? There’s something ripe and [...]
Continue Reading
Page 1 of 11
