Dear reader,
There is an old book of tales that nearly everyone has heard of. In it, a Persian king turns back from tyrant to wise ruler — not through force or counsel, but through stories, luminous and deeply humane, told by his queen across a thousand and one nights.
What stays with you from those tales is not the magic or the treasure. It is something far simpler: that one woman, through her gentleness and her wit, can soften a heart that had turned to stone.
From that idea our hotel took its name — and its promise to carry you from one surprise to the next, through rooms as varied and as unending as the stories themselves.
We built that idea into the place itself: every room is a world of its own. Not sixty identical rooms in different paint, but twelve different stories.
One floor follows the Indochine manner of old Saigon — encaustic tiles, dark wood, a ceiling fan, and the pale gold light of an afternoon just ended. Another is imperial, in bronze and gold, with heavy curtains, where you stand a little straighter on walking in. An Arabian floor draws on the tales themselves: woven rugs, pierced brass lamps throwing patterns across the walls. And Hidden Villas — a secret garden, a little dark, a little otherworldly, with a fairy-tale strangeness to it.
Then the rooms with an artificial starlit ceiling: turn off the main light and a whole night sky opens overhead. The birdcage room, where a great cage encloses the bed, a small world set inside a larger one. The Cinderella room, with its pumpkin carriage and a bathtub shaped like a red slipper.
Every night here is meant to be a new story: colourful, romantic, at times a little eerie, and always with room for surprise. That is what we want two people to take home — not a good night’s sleep, but a night worth retelling.
For couples who have been together a long while, the difficulty is never finding somewhere handsome. It is finding an evening unlike the evenings already had. Change the room and you change how two people behave for a few hours: talking more slowly, looking at each other longer, and neither one reaching for a phone.
In the old tales the storyteller is a woman. Across a thousand and one nights it was her voice that kept her alive and changed a man.
We built this place to look after how a woman feels — she being the most delicate and most beautiful creature in the world. That doesn’t live in a bouquet laid on the bed; it lives in smaller, less visible things: light that dims far enough that nobody has to squint, a mirror lit well enough to actually get ready by, a bathtub wide enough to sit in for a long time, and an entrance discreet enough that nobody feels awkward.
We believe the care goes into the things nobody photographs. Linen changed after every guest, hourly stays included. A corridor laid out so that two people need not pass anyone at all. An evening prepared with care is a way of saying “I was paying attention” without having to say it — and our job is to make that easier to say.
— 1001 Nights