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.
THE QUARANTINE 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.
THE EDINBURGH HOTEL ROOM
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.
MIRRORS IN THE QUARANTINE ROOM
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 QUARANTINE ROOM
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.
THE DADO CURTAIN
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 KETTLE BENCH
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 MIRROR
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.
THE QUARANTINE BATHROOM
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.
THE DADO
THE EDINBURGH CUPBOARD/BATHROOM DOOR
THE EDINBURGH BATHROOM
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.
THE QUARANTINE LAMP
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 QUARANTINE DESK
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 DOMINANT BEDS
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.
THE LOUNGE CHAIR AND POUF
THE TELEVISION BOX
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.
THE TELEVISION BOX
THE LOUNGE CHAIR AND POUF
THE BEDSIDE TABLE
FLW JOHNSON WAX CXHAIR
THE QUARANTINE CARPET
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 CUPBOARD DETAILING
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.
DESIGNER REBATES
KITCHEN 'ART'
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.
BEDROOM 'ART'
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 EDINBURGH HOTEL ROOM
EVERYDAY LIVING
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?
THE TWELVE-STEP PASSAGE SHOWING
THE QUARANTINE MIRROR VIEW FROM SHOWER
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.
'HOLLYWOOD' HOTEL LIVING
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.
GENERIC HOTEL ROOMS
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.
HOTEL DREAMS
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?
HOSPITAL ROOM
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.
QUARANTINE FOOD
THE EXPERIENCE OF QUARANTINE IS MORE THAN SPATIAL.
THE NUMBER OF STARS THAT A HOTEL MIGHT CLAIM IS AN IRRELEVANCE.
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.
JAIL CELL
*
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!
HOTEL ROOMS
A RANDOM SELECTION OF IMAGES OF HOTEL ROOMS
A BED; A CHAIR; A DESK; A LAMP; A TV; ARTWORK; & CURTAINS
