Luxury establishments in France can be intimidating, but if you're uncomfortable just pretend you're used to it. Photo / Supplied
Luxury establishments in France can be intimidating, but if you're uncomfortable just pretend you're used to it. Photo / Supplied
Fancy treating your love to a five-star stay but not sure how to play the part of the fabulously wealthy? Anthony Peregrine explains how to act like you belong.
I have recently returned from a plush hotel in St Paul-de-Vence, near Nice, France. Thanks to St Paul's artistic antecedents -- Picasso, Chagall and Matisse were village regulars -- the old centre overflows with galleries featuring artists no one's ever heard of. I find the art overkill tedious. The hotel, on the other hand, is a cracker.
Built on a ridge out from the village, the Mas de Pierre is a series of stone buildings -- bastides, they call them around here -- engulfed by the sort of Mediterranean gardens that always appear to be on the point of breaking loose. It looks as if it's been there forever, although it's barely 10 years old.
Even newer -- opened last year -- is the hotel's seventh building, the Bastide-des-Fleurs, which, with six suites and bedrooms, goes beyond luxury to whatever comes next. That's where we've just been. This bastide had its own pool and butler. Rooms were the size of the Maracana Stadium, and our suite had three televisions. Almost everything was beige, blue or cream and ridiculously comfortable. Towels were so fluffy you could have smothered poodles in them. We had a little courtyard, white roses as ordered on the form they had sent out to future guests, and seating options sufficient for a G8 summit.
The bastide's was, in short, accommodation where the inconveniences of daily life -- the unavailability of butlers, the lack of really good macarons, an inadequacy of plump cushions -- fell away. The rest of the world was imperceptible beyond the gardens.
I have no trouble handling any of this. I am a talented sleeper, with widely acknowledged gifts in the matter of sitting around pools, sipping in bars and eating free meals in al fresco restaurants. A childhood in Preston, Lancashire, prepared me for the rigours of leisure. Not so my wife, whom I rescued from a French farming life some years ago.
Hotel Mas de Pierre. Photo / Supplied
In our early days in top hotels, she'd make the bed and dust, to ease the chambermaid's burden. She would thank everyone for everything -- and draft replies to the printed notes of welcome from the hotel manager. She's better now -- so that, as we toured the gardens at the Mas de Pierre she didn't offer to do any deadheading.
Even so -- as we pored over the pre-arrival form, deciding what flowers we wanted, what music and which newspapers should be loaded on to the iPad, and whether we wished the staff to be "Discreet" or "Private" -- she did fix me with a stare and say, "We'll be out of our depth."
"Nonsense," I cried. "You're talking to a man who once interviewed Jeffrey Archer. I know my way around the higher echelons. Follow me." So she did. On the way, however, I reminded her of the elementary rules for tackling five-star hotels (see sidebar, right). These may be useful as your own holidays begin.
Brad and Angelina don't sneak into places, smiling apologetically. They stride in, bristling with entitlement. Do the same. The Mas de Pierre may have employed almost all the polite people available on the Cote d'Azur but, if they were so startlingly fantastic, they'd be on our side of the reception desk and we'd be serving them. Let us be honest, standing outside a hotel to open the car doors of arriving guests is not the sort of performance that need generate awe, applause or the exchange of coinage. If you're going to give a bloke a tenner for, say, hailing you a taxi, how much should you tip the heart surgeon? ("Here you are, Doc; buy yourself a small house.")
Five-star staff are not your friends
However much she smiles, the person cleaning your bathroom is doing it for money. It's not because she likes you. You're going to get a bill. No need, therefore, to invite her back to your home the following year.
Be careful whom you bump into
Five-star hotels are full of nobodies -- but also the occasional somebody. The latter need treating with circumspection. Stumbling in the lobby of the Hotel Negresco in Nice, my rather small wife bumped into an even smaller Chinese lady. This turned out to be the wife of the then prime minister of China. Yeti-sized fellows in tight suits emerged from all quarters. I thought we were in for a lifetime's re-education somewhere remote in Guangdong province. Only desperate sign language convinced all concerned that this had been a trip rather than an attempted coup d'etat.
But do wallow in it
The central irony of five-star hotels is that, for those who can afford them regularly, they're no big deal. They merely reproduce the luxury and service standards to which the wealthy are accustomed wherever they go. The people they really pay off for are the rest of us, who only get a shot at these kinds of lodgings once in a while. If then. So, while remaining apparently blase, take full advantage. Sitting at the baby grand piano in the second salon of my suite at the Plaza Athenee in Paris promoted a sense of profound wellbeing.
No excess, mind
... unless you're so famous that you can get away with it. Michael Jackson springs to mind. In a Riviera hotel, he had one room turned into a dance studio and another into a kitchen for his private chef. He would wander out at night disguised -- occasionally as a hooker. We may imagine the surprise of potential clients. Then again, most of us are not Michael Jackson; excess leaves us looking boorish. Or Russian.
Luxury hotel bedrooms are the only places you find magazines with titles such as pounds connexion or (A)musebouche4. They comprise ads for Cartier, Dolce & Gabbana and Dior, intercut with articles about spa resorts in Wallis and Futuna promoted by a fellow who's made a fortune designing cutting-edge sarongs. He wears flowing white robes. The article will inspire you to travel to W&F to shoot him. Don't. Simply hurl the magazine into the bin.
Tipping
Again, don't. Doormen and barmen in these places are richer than you or me. No use in patronising them. I now leave nothing, and they're clearly appreciative.
