We were returning from the UK to Brisbane, Australia, after a nine months' absence; an extended, well, enforced stay of nearly six months. With all of the COVID problems in the world, and the Australian government’s limit on the numbers that can enter the country, it had been difficult to get flights back; if a journey could be booked, one had to be prepared to be placed in quarantine, such was the government's declaration. Australia demands that those entering the country, apart from actors, stars, and the wealthy, (is this the Aussie cringe?), spend two weeks in hotel quarantine under the watchful eye of the police, and the threat of large fines and/or jail for any breaches.*
So it was that we ended up in a hotel room selected by the Queensland Health Department. We had asked for a twin bedroom, as we have learned to be wary of poor quality hotel mattresses that bounce and disturb unnecessarily, frequently meaning that one ends up sleeping on the floor. We were accompanied to our room from the bus that had taken us from the airport to the hotel under a police escort, by a fully-kitted police officer, complete with radio, taser, gun, and handcuffs – the works, as if these might be needed. He undertook the role of porter as well as our supervisor. The situation was such that one wondered why the policeman was not ringing a bell, yelling out "Unclean; unclean!" as we progressed through the foyer, into the lift, and along the passage to the room.
Once our guard had checked to ensure that the allocated room was indeed a twin room as requested, he left the bags and us, and closed the door with a degree of legal finality, as seen on television in those police programmes when the cell door is closed, and the smaller sliding shutter is slipped shut as a final separation. The key handed to us had been programmed to operate only the main light switch, not the door: the fourteen days had started.
It was 2:00am by the time we found ourselves alone; we were tired, so we set our luggage down and went to bed to catch up on the sleep we had lost over the last 30 hours of travel.
Being used to sunrise at 9:00am in the UK, we found ourselves awake at first light, 4:30am, and were unable to get back to sleep even once we had discovered the time. A cup of tea was prepared and the room was perused with the curtains fully drawn to one side.
What is it about hotel rooms that give them all the same feeling? We had just spent four days in an Edinburgh hotel, and while it was slightly different to the Brisbane room in the juxtaposition of its parts, it had the identical feeling. There was something of a formally impersonal ambience that offered a set of stylised functional responses for personal, indeed, intimate needs, that had been scheduled as bland list of universal ‘hotel’ necessities in a design brief - see HOTEL ROOMS below. The result was a place able to enwrap, engage, and accommodate anyone who entered. A confidential, affectionate, cosy warmth had been rationalised into an anonymously styled, slick generality expressed as a disinterested void that seemed self-assured and promotional, offering a suggestively enhanced, classy, stark difference to home with a hint of cheek and a naughty, haughty self-importance, with a licence that proffered exotic possibilities: empowerment.
There was a stage-like characteristic in this quietly rationalised, exaggerated, publicised intimacy that prompted a personal release, seen in movies as a collapse onto the bed; a leaping on the mattress; or immediate sex once the door is closed: there is the freedom to order champagne and quirky food; to walk around naked; to luxuriate in a pretend alluringly bizarre, glamorously different circumstance; in a fascinatingly romantic, unfamiliar, almost weird world that is now, somewhat unbelievably, all immediately available and mine.
Each room in Edinburgh and Brisbane came with beds that defined and dominated the plan, with: a mirrored wall; hotel 'art;' commanding, almost theatrical curtains concealing sealed windows; a supersized television set; a stylish bathroom; and a cupboard with extra pillows, an ironing board, a laundry bag, and a hair dryer. The full-height mirrors in each space were positioned so as to give unusual spatial perspectives, with a clear vision directly from the bedroom into the bathroom. The Edinburgh room reflected the WC with a concerning exactitude - just what was someone thinking? The Brisbane room highlighted the shower from the bedroom space; here the toilet was behind the swing door. Whether these arrangements were self-conscious strategies for titillation, or merely thoughtless oversights, was difficult to determine. There was a two-way glimpse, allowing private, bed poses to be exposed from the WC or the shower, and intimate bathroom actions to be studied from the bed. The mirrors offered easy, usually forbidden access to vistas of personal activity, stimulating entitlement.
The Edinburgh hotel room had a narrow shelf along the wall opposite the beds, with yet another mirror beside the television set positioned above, playfully twinning the glass screen, locating the everyday into the unique world of ‘media,’ as if on TV. The ledge swelled out to make a desk where one side chair stood, making a space for bags below. The window wall was shrouded in full-height, blue curtains that bore no relationship to the fixed glazing. They were more podium curtains than window covers, stage-like in their designer intent, ready to reveal the make believe that turned out to be a disappointing prospect – a view of the airport car park.
The Brisbane room had nothing like this convenient ledge, with nowhere for the bags to go. It provided only a narrow table with one side chair in the corner of the room. In a darker corner opposite, there was one lounge chair, and one footstool, an exotic pouf. Just why there was only one of each chair in this twin room capable of accommodating four people - two king beds - is not known. The curtains in this space had the same grand role in the design as those in the Edinburgh room. The Brisbane room had established a dado theme, with a dark panelling 1200mm high wrapping around the bed wall and the ensuite wall, leaving the wall opposite dramatically blank, apart from the television set that was fitted into a recess that had a strange, black, square, boxed mass beside it, perhaps to improve the proportions of the wall ‘element.’ Everything seemed to be considered pictorially. Again the curtains had no relation to their window function; they were a design element, with those behind the bed stretching the length of the wall above the dado even though the window was only 1.5m wide. The curtains on the other window wall that was half glass - this was a corner room - were uniquely tailor-made to cover the full width and height of the window and wall, with the fabric joined to deliberately reproduce the dado both in colour and height, but in fabric. There was a self-conscious, theatrical quality exposed here; a designer’s performance piece.
One realised that these rooms had been styled using the same visual parameters as those adopted for car design. The rules had all to do with pretty appearances rather than any expression of function, with overall patterns and visual intrigues being more important than the definition of any precise purpose. One could see the curtains performing the same task as the black-bordered glass does in vehicle design, as it conceals the vehicle's bulky structural panelling, turning the potentially awkward, heavy mass into a whizzy image of slick gloss, glass, and speed with a careful cunning and guile.
It was this two-tone dado curtain that made one realise how contrived the hotel room is; the upper shade matched the other curtains behind the bed, with the lower colour being the deeper hue of the dado sheeting. As the days of enforced quarantine passed, one noticed more about the Brisbane room, and discovered its quirks, failures, and successes. It was all a very considered space, detailed carefully, precisely, and very purposefully, but it failed completely to provide for the simple basics of ordinary life and its living; it was just a slick stage set: are all hotel rooms just performance places?
The ceiling was smartly designed with ‘shadow’ cornice voids and recessed curtain pelmets, allowing the ceiling plane to read as a magically floating rectangle. The air conditioning grille was placed in the bulkhead of the dropped ceiling over the entry zone. It was this space that was fitted out with the general storage cupboard and the tea-making bench with the safe, the china cupboard, and refrigerator below: the ensuite opened off this area.
The bathroom was large and sunny, a result of the corner planning and the preferred window patterning on the exterior. The fact that it was pleasantly bright had nothing to do with the designer’s care for the user; it was all a matter of the ambitions for the elevation. The dado theme continued in the bathroom, with the four lower tiles being a darker shade than the white tiles above. Here the tonal concept was developed further as with the curtains, with the granite for the basin bench being a tone darker than the dado tiling. The slick detailing was continued in the full-height, frame-less glass shower screen wall panel; the overhead and wall shower unit; the three millimetre step down into the shower; the designer floor wastes; the on-bench basin and its upright post tap; and, most grand of all, the large circular mirror that was suspended in front of the wide, full-height frosted glass window. The full-height door to the bathroom was glazed with tinted glass: it was all a tour de force in spatial elegance.
One might have thought that the idea of such a door was to allow natural light into the entry space, but the doors were glazed even when there were no windows in the bathroom. Our setup was the anomaly; other bathrooms were completely internal. There was no thought for people, convenience or comfort here; every time the bathroom was visited in the middle of the night, the glazed door lit up the whole room, disturbing others trying to sleep. This was all about pure style; looking good for the transient occupant.
It appeared as though the four-full-tile high dado in the bathroom had been the gauge for the height of the dado throughout, because in the bedroom, the matching 1200mm high dado was higher than the sill of the window. There seemed to have been a clash of intents here, between the elevational pattern and the room detailing. The solution to this clash was to construct the dado as a panel standing 120mm off the wall, allowing this free-standing panel to slide across in front of the lower 1000mm sill, creating what one could describe as a recessed inverted pelmet for the curtains that extended the length of the wall, covering the 1.5m window, and the 2.0m and 4.0m of solid wall each side. The solution sacrificed floor space for this selected aesthetic dado preference. Maybe the idea of continuing the dado in the curtain made the designer persist with this modern wainscoting and maintain its height throughout in spite of the obvious clash? The alignments must have looked good on the drawing.
In Edinburgh, the room offered no refrigerator or kitchen cupboard space. The clothes, ironing board, hair dryer cupboard had been located in the entry space at the end of the shower, allowing the large glazed sliding door to cleverly double as the bathroom door.# In the same way that the mirrors played with spatial perceptions, the bedroom end of this cupboard was oddly formed by a framed frosted glass panel, giving the impression of less solid wall from the bedroom area, suggesting a wider void leading out of this area to the entry/bathroom. Everything seemed to be pictorial in its intent, a visual game; a slick stage set happy to play with illusions. Here in Brisbane, things were much the same: even the bedside lamps and the table lamps were assuming unusual poses with their cranked arms forming unexpected angles as they supported small globes. One sensed a design strategy that struggled for a grandly different, striking display structured to surprise and amaze.
As time passed in quarantine in Brisbane, one quickly discovered that, apart from the carpeted floor, there was a deficit in horizontal surfaces; that there was nowhere to put anything. One wondered if the designer had ever thought about the place being used by two people, let alone four. There was only one arm chair, one side chair, and one pouf or footrest for sitting. The horizontal surfaces, apart from the bathroom bench, comprised one small rectangular table, two round bedside shelves, and the bench in the entry for the kettle. There was nowhere to put two large bags, or the smaller carry-on luggage. One did discover a folding frame for one piece of luggage in the cupboard, but there was no place to set this up other than in the passage spaces.
The whole room was dominated by two large beds, leaving circulation strips about 1400mm wide as a perimeter zone; quarantine was life in a twelve-step passage. The bags had to fit into this area. One soon realised that the beds would have to be pushed to one side in order to create a usable sitting space, allowing the small table to be skewed into the corner to let two sit at it together using the extra side chair that we had requested.
The rearrangement provided a squeezy place to eat - a small dining area that was sunny in the morning. This desk could double as a place to sit to play the dominoes that arrived on Christmas day; and cribbage. The lounge chair in its dim corner was not inviting, so it and the pouf became storage ledges: one had to put stuff somewhere.
While the television panel dominated the vertical surfaces of the room with its black rectangular mass, one soon discovered that it could only be viewed from the beds. Had the designer thought about this? The beds became more seats than any of the chairs provided.
Black was the theme of the colour scheme, both tonally and as a solid colour. The table was black, the television was black, the cupboards were all black, the granite in the bathroom was black. The carpet was predominantly black with patches of speckled cream and grey. It looked like a design that had been ink-jetted onto a standard tile; it was very unattractive, reminding one of those classic hotel carpets that will never reveal any stain or spill, or even the dropped piece of salami. Looking out of the window, one could see the same geometric patterning of the carpet repeated on the glass awning over the footpath. The whole hotel had been themed. The colours that weren't black, were greys and white: the kettle bench was white marble, as were the bedside units; the bathroom tiles were grey and white; the curtains were brown greys, and the walls and ceilings white. Doors were black; door frames were black; rubbish bins were black; oddly the chairs were all a tan-coloured faux leather that matched the bed bases.
The doors revealed the singularly stylish intent too. While the entry door fitted into a standard height opening, (one guessed that this was the tested fire door), the bathroom door was a floor to ceiling glazed panel flourish, grand for no apparent reason but for appearance. The cupboard doors were full height too, but only as an illusion; they were divided into small high doors and doors slightly lower than the entry door. These lower panels that opened up the hanging space, came with a fake groove to suggest another division, with the dark recess lining up with that above the doors under the kettle bench. The critical thing in this place was the image, not the function. Even the side gable of the cupboard had been rebated and painted black to visually continue the recess between the lower and upper doors, the finger grip slot. It was clear that everything had been designed to look pretty on paper, and stylish when complete, with slick alignments and suave shadings.
The 'art' struggled to find a wall to display itself on with the curtains shrouding two planes. One image of an old tractor was above the kettle bench, and a photograph of a Ferris wheel, and an image of an old windmill and a farm shed had been placed together on the bathroom wall of the bedroom. Even the images had been themed: the hotel was near Brisbane's central agricultural show grounds.
The 'art' in Edinburgh was more typical of hotel art. Three colourful abstract images were displayed as an artfully ‘collaged’ grouped set above the beds.
The quarantine room was all pure theatre, not a place shaped for convenient use or daily living; form was almost irrelevant to any function: it was merely a symphony in black, certainly not a place for a comfortable 14-day quarantine stay. One was left having to live out of bags, stepping around stuff strewn on the floor. It was not a room designed for the ‘everyday.’ Are hotel rooms only designed for very short stays? Are they truly only bits of theatre, styled to impress, to allow guests to fantasise, to perform during their transitional phase of travel?
Hotels are really ephemeral places. Stories that tell of writers, for example, living in hotels, seem to imply some sense of permanence to this evanescent, performing lifestyle where one can feel pampered and special every day, surviving on the high of the exotic lifestyle; but this illusion simply adds to the mystique of the quirky public persona. The expectations of an ordinary, comfortable existence over 14 days are never going to be fulfilled as there is an inherent clash of intent in this mix. Visions of cigar smoking, and martini sipping at any time of the day in a dressing gown, do not embody the usual, private, ordinary everyday of the many.
The comings and goings in hotels are the ordinary flux for this business that wants to present something different, a special interpretation of living in style, expecting folk to overindulge just for a short period. The effort to charm can be seen as branding, where the hotel name seeks to be embedded in memory as something unique, bespoke and desirable. Hotels want repeat business and create chains for folk to be familiar with place, brand, and service no matter where they might be in the world, as if each place had been personalised just for the visitor.
With these expectations, it is little wonder that rooms concentrate on style rather than the content needed for living a comfortably, contented, simple life. Perhaps other spaces should have been chosen for quarantine rather than using the empty hotels in what seems to be more of an exercise to generate income for these struggling businesses than offering some comfort for weary travellers asked to prove their wellness. Is it really the government trying to apologise to the hotel owners for the impact of its restrictions on numbers allowed to enter Australia? The decision to use hotels seems to have nothing to do with the health and well-being of those incarcerated for 14 days.
The hotel is purely a stage allowing people to act out their fantasies, and those seen in films and on TV. For those relegated to quarantine, wanting to just live an ordinary life in the room, like ourselves, the room turned one into an invalid: the only place to retreat to, to read or write, (well, to tablet type), or to watch TV in any comfort, was the bed. One was constantly reminded of being in hospital, which is ironic, when the whole intent of this stay is to prove one's health status. Does the government assume everyone is ill, making a judgement before any proof, a position that is contrary to the normal legal understanding where innocence is assumed, and guilt has to be proved?
A different place for quarantine needs to be sought out; hotels are not the answer, even if they present themselves as a stylish, quality brand - “Gosh, we stayed at the Hilton!” - the food on offer in our case leaves much to be desired. One might have thought that any hotel of quality would have thought twice about being associated with poor food and forced confinement.
What one comes to realise is that a hotel offers a complex package, with the room being only one small part of the experience. There are the bars, the restaurants, the cafes, the lounges, the meeting areas, the pool, the gym, and more, that all become a part of the hotel experience. One never just gets a room, although this space becomes one’s base. The use of hotels for quarantine purposes confines everything to the bedroom that was never meant to be used in this way. The lack of any fresh air and open sunshine should be enough to make governments aware of this circumstance - its inadequacy.
P.S.
The Edinburgh hotel was not free from silliness either: only one side chair was provided in the bed area of the twin room, and one tiny towel hook was available in the bathroom. There was no refrigerator; the kettle was boiled on the narrow portion of the wall shelf.
#
One recalls a similar, but perhaps more precise piece of design in a York hotel. Here the swing door doubled as an exact ‘double-fit’ - for the toilet door and the door to the shower /basin area: it latched nicely into each location. When in use, the door would enclose the WC, leaving the shower area open to the bedroom; when the shower/basin area was in use, the toilet area would open into this bathroom space. It seemed to be a designer's trick rather than resolving any functional necessity, somewhat like the Edinburgh door that was less of a slick resolution. Indeed, the York idea added an unnecessary complication to the shower/ WC entry, even though one could admire the rigour that was missing at Edinburgh. Although this Scottish sliding door did the job, when used to conceal the cupboard, it was a neat fit; but when used to enclose the toilet area, a significant portion of the door remained over the width of the cupboard, making access to one end awkward.
*
As if the government might be responding to criticism of the leniency shown to ‘stars’ and the wealthy, the tennis players and their entourages who have arrived for the Australian Open in 2021 all have to undergo strict quarantine; but even then, the ‘star’ players are given certain privileges, like balconies and practice time – a deliberate and unapologetic ploy decided upon by the conveners of the event. Our quarantine was 14 days confined to one room with no opening windows, and with no time periods allocated for outside exercise: one was not allowed to put a foot outside the door, and had to accept the food that was plonked outside the door in a brown paper bag. The whole confinement seemed to have been something organised by Corrective Services. Police officers led us to our lockup, and escorted us out of it. It is a shame that such rigour and concern for health matters did not extend to all matters involved in quarantine. I frequently found myself humming Queen's ‘I want to break free’:
I
want to break free
I want to break
free
I want to break free from your
lies
You're so self satisfied I don't
need you
I've got to break free
God
knows, God knows I want to break free.
P.P.S.
26 JANUARY 2021
One has to ask just where George Brandis, the High Commissioner for Australia who has recently flown in from London, is spending his two weeks in quarantine. Those still stranded have every right to complain that he can travel so freely while they have to wait months, possibly years, to get back to Australia. The mathematics of the situation is ignored by government and the media, but it is clear that unless something different is done, it could be 2023 before some people get home: Happy Australia Day!
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