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A Room for London: a new installation and hotel on the South Bank

The Sheet — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 18:42:37 +0000

Liz Bird was one of the first guests to spend the night at A Room for London, a 'holiday houseboat' architectural installation on top of the Queen Elizabeth Hall overlooking the Thames. It will be open for bookings to the rest of us this Thursday

Ship's log, Roi des Belges: Sunday 15 January, 2012. Time: 4pm. Weather: fine. Wind: south-westerly.

Crew safely on board and feeling very pleased with themselves, standing on the top deck sipping prosecco and waving at promenaders on the South Bank as they admire the Thames river views from Big Ben round to St Paul's. It has been an unusual embarkation, via a backstage door at the Queen Elizabeth Hall and up a specially installed lift to the roof.

Resembling a 1920s steamer and designed by architect David Kohn and artist Fiona Banner, the Roi des Belges interior is red-stained plywood with not a nautical blue and white stripe in sight. The spacious main deck's bow is lined with windows and a wraparound wool banquette. There's a massive bed, which cleverly converts into twin beds by sliding on runners built into the floor.

Behind is a table and chairs next to a kitchenette. A shower room and toilet – with portholes giving views of St Paul's or the London Eye – straddle the entrance hall at the back of the boat, or "stern".

The pièce de resistance is the snug upper deck, filled with London-themed books, which we quickly rename "The Bridge" and where we write up the ship's log. This weighty tome is where guests who managed to secure a night's stay when bookings went live last September (six months' worth of bookings snapped up in 12 minutes) are expected to chart their experience. Fountain pen provided.

Alain de Botton is the philosopher behind Living Architecture, the foundation which rents out unusual holiday homes and came up with the idea for the project. He put "demons", as his 3am log entry under the heading "sightings" when he stayed earlier this month. Our entry for the same hour reads: "Man, singing loudly, zig-zags across Waterloo Bridge".

Later this month, the boat will host its first "artist in residence", the multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bird who will play a one-off gig via live webcast (28 January). Other musicians such as David Byrne and Laurie Anderson will also perform, and writers including Michael Ondaatje and Jeanette Winterson will take part in A London Address there, a series of monthly writings and recordings .

We use our binoculars to study the faces of those beneath us on the South Bank: lovers, strollers, joggers. We are constantly drawn to the "vessel" opposite. As night falls, the opulent Savoy hotel lights up like a jewelled beacon, its crystal interiors shining out over the inky Thames.

Ship's log: 5pm. A police launch, its sirens blaring, speeds along the water, dodging the packed tourist boats. Trains rattle over Hungerford Bridge, snatches of conversation drift upwards, a saxophone wails plaintively.

Ship's log: 11.26pm. Crew retires for the night. Blinds are left untouched, but sleep doesn't come quickly. We keep sitting up and looking out at London's multi-coloured riverside.

Monday, 16 January. Ship's log: 7am. the sun has just risen. On the starboard side, The Shard pierces a pinky red sky.

Ship's log: 11am. Binoculars stowed, log up to date, crew disembarks, wishing their "trip" could have been longer.

• Be warned, the first sale of nights in the boat, for between January and June, sold out in just 12 minutes. Bookings for July to December will go on sale online this Thursday, 19 January, at midday GMT. A Room for London (aroomforlondon.co.uk, living–architecture.co.uk) sleeps two and costs £300 for a night, one night maximum

A Room for London – review

The Sheet — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 12:51:31 +0000

A small vessel perched on top of the Queen Elizabeth Hall has become London's most coveted hotel room

The river Thames has a way of defeating plans for its jollification. For decades architects have looked on its great, tempting emptiness and felt an irresistible urge to propose beaches, inhabited bridges, lidos, zones for festivals fluttering with pennants and balloons, places to promenade as if it were the edge of the Mediterranean. In the 1980s Richard Rogers imagined an archipelago of pleasure, with the forms and construction methods of oil rigs remade into towers and pinnacles of fun. Most recently, the architects Gensler proposed the floating hospitality suite they called the London River Park.

Mostly these plans don't happen. The river flows on, lugubrious and imperturbable, which is possibly because, as Joseph Conrad observed, it is not really a fun sort of thing. "And this also," he wrote in Heart of Darkness, "has been one of the dark places of the earth," as he embarked on that book's journey into forms of savagery that lay beneath a veil of civilisation. For him it was the "sleepless river" of a "monstrous" and "brooding" city. "What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river," he also wrote, "into the mystery of an unknown earth!"

One Thames project that has happened is A Room for London, a boat-like object perched high on the roof of the Queen Elizabeth hall at the Southbank Centre, as if stranded there by a receding deluge. Where many Thames proposals want to put things of land on to water, this puts something riverine – a boat – on to land. It is a temporary structure, a cross between building and sculpture, by the architect David Kohn and the artist Fiona Banner. It contains a single hotel room which anyone can in theory book, if with rather more difficulty than Olympic tickets. When nights for the first six months were made available they sold out in 12 minutes; the next batch goes on sale on Thursday (at £120 a night).

This little space is the production of an impressive array of cultural impresarios: the Southbank Centre, Artangel, and Living Architecture, the organisation set up by the writer Alain de Botton to build beautiful new houses which can be rented for holidays. It comes, like many cultural projects in 2012, with an Olympic tag, being officially part of the cultural Olympiad. As well as paying guests, writers, artists and musicians have been invited to stay there, and be creative.

From the outside the jaunty vessel seems to fall within the "fun" category of Thames projects. It juts perkily into the void, and three little wind turbines, like displaced propellers, whirr on the top of a triangular rig. It is a toy, palpably and deliberately incongruous. It is a folly. But it turns out that its makers also had Conradian ambitions. The boat is called the Roi des Belges, after the vessel in which Conrad himself sailed up the river Congo, in the journey that would inspire Heart of Darkness. Inside there is a cabinet containing old maps of the Thames and the Congo, in reference to the parallels that Conrad made between the two rivers. An octagonal table and a box of dominos echo similar objects described in the master's novels.

There are other inspirations. The intricate house and museum of the architect Sir John Soane is cited by David Kohn as a help in designing the "episodic" sequence of small spaces that are inside the boat, as you progress from a little vestibule to a galley, to a bedroom that opens up to penthouse views of the river, bracketed by the Palace of Westminster to the left, and St Paul's Cathedral to the right. Alongside the river maps there is a copy of a drawing by Soane's collaborator JM Gandy that shows Soane's Bank of England as if it were a Roman ruin, and which might be taken as a comment, if desired, on financial calamity, or on the fragility of civilisation described by Conrad. Kohn also mentions the baroque architect Nicholas Hawksmoor as an influence, even though his heavy white stone churches would come top of most lists of Structures Least Likely to Float. The spire-like superstructure of A Room for London refers to these churches, and to the spires of London in general.

The main point, says Kohn, is to combine the intimate and the epic, in a way not unlike the relation of domesticity to vastness that you get in boats. "The interiors feel comfortable and you know what to do there, but it's not just an easy or twee kind of comfort. You are connected to the Thames, to a wider world, also to what one thinks of the world. You have a relationship to disputed, uncertain territory."

In all this the intention was to avoid kitsch and creating a one-line joke. The timber-lined interior, stained in places in rich pinkish-red, is not pushed to the point where it is literally boat-like in every detail, but rather seeks other architectural qualities, which is where the influence of Soane comes in. It was also important to Kohn and Banner that the structure was exactingly well made, by the specialist company Millimetre. "It is solid; it has a kind of earnestness," says Kohn, which keeps it away from being a stage set.

And so the lucky purchasers of nights in the hotel room, the intellectual aesthete's equivalent of Willy Wonka's Golden Ticket, will be able to contemplate the "venerable stream" much as Conrad's characters did in the cruising yawl Nellie. At sunset they will be able to watch the gloom "become more sombre every minute, as if angered by the approach of the sun". They can, should they want to, think their thoughts about the world and their place in it.

A Room for London is small, and temporary, and will only be fully enjoyed by a few people. It is not a prototype for future Thames-side development, and offers no solutions to the problems of urban regeneration. It may, even, not quite match the fathomless profundity of its inspirations, being rather an enjoyable and well-made jeu d'esprit. But I have a feeling it will give satisfactions that other Olympic projects will not match: it is intelligent, witty, pleasurable, and is based on observing its surroundings as they actually are, rather than imposing a bombastic idea of what they should be.

Rowan Moore

Stay in your very own Frank Lloyd Wright house

The Sheet — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 00:08:07 +0000

Three of Frank Lloyd Wright's iconic houses can be seen on a day trip from Pittsburgh – and there's even the opportunity to spend the night in one of them

Frank Lloyd Wright was coming towards me in his trademark pork-pie hat and opera-goer's cape, frosty eyebrows raised, when I woke up. As a rule I don't dream of world-famous architects – never, so far as I recall, have I dreamed of Frank Gehry or IM Pei – but there were extenuating factors. I'd nodded off over a biography of Wright, reading about how he'd arrive unannounced at a house of his design to see how its owners were treating it. And the house where I lay, the Duncan House, an hour south-east of Pittsburgh, was an actual FLW, one of only half a dozen where Wright-lovers can stay the night.

Left in sole possession, my wife and I struggled that first evening to make ourselves at home. To begin with, we tried going for a walk. The house is at the end of a mile-long private driveway, set amid a 125-acre wooded estate. In October the trees were in their autumn finery, spanning the spectrum from deep red to palest yellow. Climbing a hill, we looked out over the rolling Laurel Highlands, one of Pennsylvania's prettiest landscapes and a favourite getaway for Pittsburghers, before following a trail to a secluded pond. On our return leg, we looked in on the estate's two other houses, both designed by a pupil of Wright's and bearing his influence.

Back at home base, we tried walking around the single-storey house, considering it from every angle: the horizontal bands of bleached mahogany, the gutterless eaves, the stonework of the chimney, and the carport (Wright hated enclosed spaces like garages, attics and basements). Inside the house was a vintage 1950s American kitchen, like the set of Happy Days, but instead of cooking we made a picnic at the living room table. This was our favourite space, the heart of the house with its cathedral roof and fireplace, and the expansive windows that allowed us to sit warmly inside without missing the magnificent foliage. It wasn't until we were ready for bed that we noticed another typical FLW feature – no curtains or blinds on the windows.

So, up at first light, we made the 40-minute drive south through the Laurel Highlands to Fallingwater. Wright built Fallingwater in the 1930s, when he was pushing 70, and such was its impact that he never again lacked for commissions. People have been visiting, photographing and writing about the place ever since but it still has the power to startle at first sight. The family who commissioned Fallingwater, owners of a Pittsburgh department store, anticipated something more conventional: a weekend cabin with a view of the falls. What they got instead was a bravura exercise in modern architecture and engineering – the core of the house resting on boulders with terraces of reinforced concrete cantilevered out over the falls. To their credit, they were content to foot the bill, which, in true Wright style, never ceased to climb.

Seven miles from Fallingwater and now under the ownership of Lord Palumbo, Kentuck Knob is another FLW favourite. Crowning the brow of a hill and shrouded by trees, Kentuck Knob is built around a hexagonal kitchen and its angles just keep getting odder. Wright hated the dark, Victorian houses of his childhood, calling their rooms boxes within boxes; one of his abiding aims was to break down those boxes and blur the line between inside and out. Built for local ice-cream barons, Kentuck Knob achieves these aims with considerable charm. Adding to its appeal, the house and grounds are dotted with modern art – works by Claes Oldenburg, Andy Goldsworthy and Richard Serra – from Lord Palumbo's collection.

Having toured these two houses, we returned for a second night at the Duncan House and found ourselves looking on "our" FLW with fresh eyes. Now that we'd learned a little about Wright's methods and motives, certain things made more sense: the absence of decoration (Wright abhorred "inferior desecrators"); the narrow gallery leading to the bedrooms (a mere passing-through space, to be minimized as far as possible); the built-in shelving; and the division of the house between living areas (spacious and open) and private spaces (smaller and darker, places to sleep and take shelter rather than for living).

FLW houses try to teach their inhabitants how their paternalistic designer would you to live: together, around the fireplace; in harmony with nature; simply and without clutter. If Americans have largely ignored his lessons, holding on to their garages and basements, preferring to live in bigger and bigger boxes on sub-divided estates, that isn't Wright's fault.

The Duncan House is no Fallingwater. In common with the other five Wright houses where you can stay the night (all in the Midwest), it's a Usonian. Usonians, designed and built in the last decades of Wright's life, were prefabricated houses that could be assembled according to one of a dozen blueprints. They were meant to be affordable, bringing good design within reach of middle-class America. (Though affordable was always a very relative term with Wright.)

The only way you'll ever get to experience Fallingwater is on a guided tour. Staying at Duncan House felt a bit like being able to take a Rembrandt home from the gallery – not a major work, a sketch, but a Rembrandt all the same.
We certainly got to like the place and were sorry to leave – perhaps, if we'd been allowed to stay, we'd have become better people! Lingering on our last morning, I took time to flick through the comments book. In the couple of years since the Duncan House opened, Wright aficionados from all over the world have stayed there, adding an extra, personal facet to their FLW tour. It's not cheap but very few were complaining. 'The dream of a lifetime' wrote more than one.

• The Duncan House, 187 Evergreen Lane, Acme (+1 877 833 7829) costs $425 per night (two night minimum); the house sleeps up to six – extra $50 per night for fourth, fifth and sixth guests. Fallingwater, 1491 Mill Run Road, Mill Run, (fallingwater.org; book tours several months in advance). Kentuck Knob, 723 Kentuck Road, Dunbar (kentuckknob.com; advance bookings recommended). Flights from London to Pittsburgh with various US airlines start at around £340, if booked via kayak.co.uk.

Thoroughly modern Miami: art and architecture tours

The Sheet — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 00:08:48 +0000

Two ways of getting under the skin of Miami's creative scene: a Vespa tour of off-beat arts venues, and a limo ride around the best MiMo (Miami Modernist) architecture

'Do you guys want soup? It's very good – vegetable. I just finished making it ..." It's not the first thing you expect to hear when meeting a cutting-edge collector of American contemporary art, but there's something maternal and unpretentious about Mera Rubell, co-director of the Rubell Family Collection.

I accept, partly to calm my nerves. I've just ridden here on a Vespa – a cool powder-blue one, no less – with Roam Rides, which offers art tours of Miami by Vespa.

There are numerous art galleries and museums in the city, and 2013 will see the opening of the Miami Art Museum (miamiartmuseum.org), designed by Herzog and de Meuron (of Beijing Olympics fame). Next month it will host the 10th Art Basel Miami Beach (1-4 December, artbasel.com).

The Vespa tour is a brilliant way to explore the city's less obvious art scene. Our guide and instructor for the morning is Kit Sullivan, an amateur artist and graffiti fan who aims to show guests off-the-radar galleries and street art projects. The Rubell rarely appears on tourist maps, has very little marketing and attracts just 200 people a week, but it is a personal collection, where the owners often act as guides.

The building was once a holding facility for the Drug Enforcement Administration (storing tonnes of seized cocaine and cash). It's accessed by a huge, caged doorway. Kit points out bullet holes in the wall.

Mera and her husband Donald began their influential collection in the 1960s. It has now grown to almost 6,500 pieces, with 200 on loan across the world. "We were lucky, I guess," smiles Mera. "We had an eye for it. We bought pieces from Francesco Clemente, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat long before anyone had heard of them."

As we wander round the gallery I'm drawn to some privately commissioned Sterling Ruby canvases. With dark nods to American abstract expressionism, Russian constructivism, graffiti and tribal markings, they're powerful and overwhelming. It's hard to believe the beach is just minutes away.

Then we're on the road again. Riding on Miami's wide open roads is pleasurably sedate, and with the sun on my back I gain confidence and speed. Over the engine noise Kit shouts: "I'm going to take you somewhere we're really proud of in Miami. A few years ago, this area was in decline but wait until you see it. We've got something really cool going on."

Wynwood Walls, a once-derelict warehouse district, is being reborn as an arts neighbourhood. Vast grey walls are being transformed by international street artists including Shepard Fairey (the name behind those iconic 2008 Obama images), Os Gemeos from Brazil, Futura from New York and Lady Aiko of Japan. Musicians, painters, actors and poets are all setting up studios here.

On each corner, a piece of street art is taking shape. The artists don't mind us taking photographs but many refuse to speak to visitors and cover their faces. Hawaiian-born Estria, a pioneer of street art and a respected social historian, is more approachable: "A lot of my friends were b-boys and I used to go watch them breakdancing. I kind of fell into it. With hip-hop arts, it's all connected."

He's too modest to mention the Estria Foundation (estria.org), set up with Jeremy LaTrasse, co-founder of Twitter. The organisation was conceived to effect "social change through art" by fundraising and art events.

As he paints, he talks me through some terminology. A "bomb" is an illegal work, "thrown up" fast, often at night. "Slashing" (when an artist "throws up" his tag over a legal piece) is one of the most disrespectful things that can happen in graffiti.

On the way back to the hotel I gawp at the stunning art deco facades of Ocean Drive, and am keen to learn more about the city's architecture. So I book a MiMo (Miami Modernist) tour with Charles J Kropke, an architectural historian who has written a book on MiMo (between overseeing 20 companies and his single-parent family of eight adopted kids).

We will be touring the classics of the future, not this time by Vespa, but like rap-stars – in a limousine with drinks cabinet, leather seats, tinted windows and mirrored ceilings.

Our first stop is the International Inn on the Miami Beach side of 79th Street Causeway. In the unrestored 1956 building, Charles leads us to a shimmering pool: "Just look at those blue opaque tiles. I can see this as an incredible boutique hotel – the way those doors all open on to the pool, that crisp, easy symmetry. It's so Miami."

The Formica counter is a little chipped, but I can picture a vacationing Don Draper in the vintage lounge chair, louchely raising a Martini glass through swirls of cigarette smoke.

Down the road is another off-beat jewel, the New Yorker hotel on Biscayne Boulevard, with pastel bath suites and vintage ceiling fans in every room. "The owners spent 18 months sourcing the original-font nameplates for the bedroom doors," says the receptionist.

We take in motels, garages, diners, ice-cream parlours. The tour is so new that one or two of the owners seem pleasantly surprised to see us.

The Biltmore Hotel is not strictly MiMo, but we make an exception. The 1920s Spanish Revivalist resort with its Moorish tower and sweeping driveway oozes Miami glamour. The enormous, U-shaped pool was groundbreaking in its day and hosted beauty pageants and synchronised swimming displays. We learn that Johnny Weissmuller worked here as a lifeguard and had a penchant for streaking on the job.

There's one more building to see – the Pan Am terminal at Dinner Key, one of the earliest international seaplane airports and a reminder of the glamour of the golden years of aviation, portrayed in the new TV series Pan Am, which started on BBC2 this week. The clattering heels have long fallen silent but the magnificent winged clock stands as a timely reminder of one of Miami's brightest eras.

• The Rubell Family Collection's American Exuberance exhibition runs from 30 November until July 2012 (rfc.museum). Street art scooter tours cost $75pp plus $50 for a two-person scooter (+1 888 760 7626, roamrides.com). Charles J Kropke's tailormade architecture tours from $65-$85pp (+1 305 774 9019, dragonflyexpeditions.com). KLM (klm.com) flies Heathrow-Miami from £401 return. The Morgan Mondrian (+1 305 514 1500, mondrian-miami.com), on South Beach has doubles from $270. Doubles at the New Yorker (hotelnewyorkermiami.com) from $125

Top 10 reasons to love Switzerland

The Sheet — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 10:37:52 +0000

From lofty mountains to high-end hotels and cutting-edge architecture – 10 reasons for falling for Switzerland, your Favourite European Country in our Travel Awards 2011

Zermatt rebooted

This Matterhorn-cuddling meta-village has such a standing among skiers and mountain climbers that it could have rested on its laurels till the end of time. But Zermatt has added a cool, contemporary edge to its chocolate-box charms. Last December saw the opening of the Backstage Hotel (+41 27 966 6970, backstagehotel.ch, rooms from €250), a boutique inn with rich-kitsch suites designed to within an inch of their lives – beds are on transparent boxes in the centre of the rooms. It has a super-stylish little cinema (with chandeliers) and bar, and the spa is themed not on Buddhism like so many, but on the Christian story of creation. All over town, ultra-luxury designer chalets – fronted with glass and chrome rather than pine and cutesy balconies – are springing up, while the traditional Hotel Europe (+41 27 966 2700, europe-zermatt.ch, rooms from €225) has unveiled an airy new modern wing, complete with bijou spa. Come dinnertime in the resort, the big story is Restaurant Heimberg (+41 27 967 8484, heimberg-zermatt.ch, three-course dinner from CHF74 – £52), a menu-free high-end restaurant where supermodel-esque staff interview guests about their tastes before serving personalised multiple-course feasts. Or opt for gourmet mountain hut Chez Vrony (+41 27 967 2552, chezvrony.ch).

Fresh Basel

The oldest and most important contemporary art fair in the world, Art Basel (artbasel.com, 13-17 June 2012) is the tip of the iceberg in Switzerland's third-largest city. The permanent collection at Fondation Beyeler (fondationbeyeler.ch) bristles with Giacomettis, Picassos, Monets and Bacons, while the Kunstmuseum (kunstmuseumbasel.ch) houses the world's oldest public art collection, and its largest collection of Holbeins. A 30-minute bus ride takes you across the German border to Riehen and the Vitra Design Museum (design-museum.de) home to buildings by Zaha Hadid and Tadao Ando, or take a tram to the Gotheanum (goetheanum.org) in neighbouring Dornach. The centre of Rudolph Steiner's anthroposophy movement, this vast, visionary 1928 structure in cast concrete is built without a single right angle and is rich in sculptural forms, murals and stained glass.

Master strokes

You're never more than 20km from a lake or river in Switzerland, and the Swiss keep their H₂O extraordinarily clean, so even in the centre of its busiest cities, pretty much any river or lake is ripe for the dipping. Zurich tops the lido tables, with 18 outdoor bathing areas (zuerich.com), many of which morph into funky, artsy bars by night, but Geneva also has its posh pontoons, complete with sauna and hammams, in the form of Bains des Paquis (bains-des-paquis.ch). And both Basel's Rhine and Bern's Aare rivers throng with paddling punters in summer, some even commute to work this way.

Oases with oomph

There's nothing much you can teach the Swiss about water-based wellness. They have a 2,000-year history of tapping the country's abundant thermal springs, but never stop reinventing the idea. Among the most sumptuous spas are those of Hotel Therme in Vals (+41 81 926 8961, therme-vals.ch, admission €31), an austere-glam grotto carved into the rock by Peter Zumthor, the Swiss architect behind this year's Serpentine Pavilion in Hyde Park, and Tschuggen Bergoase (+41 81 378 9999, tschuggen.ch, half-day £46) in Arosa, whose spooky glass spinnakers shooting from the mountainside flood the space with light. New kid on the block since last spring is the huge spa at the Eden Roc (+41 91 785 7171, edenroc.ch, half-day £35) in Ascona, whose mosaic- and stone-covered walls in shades of blue and grey reflect the colours of Lake Maggiore, a loofah's throw away.

La dolce Helvetia

Switzerland's Italian-speaking region is its sunniest, and the cantons that border Lake Maggiore in the south-east boast balmy climes, lush sub-tropical flora and a laid-back riviera lifestyle fuelled by Italia-tinged cuisine. Home to lotus blossoms and giant sequoias, the stunning botanical garden on San Pancrazio, one of the lake's two Brissago Islands (isolebrissago.ch) is a must-see, as is the vibrant city of Lugano (lugano-tourism.ch). And while no self-respecting adrenalinista would miss the chance to recreate 007's Goldeneye bungee jump at the Verzasca dam, the tranquil, hamlet-studded and largely hotel-free valleys of Verzasca (verzasca.ch) and Maggia (vallemaggia.ch) are the real finds here. There is just a sprinkling of unpretentious, reasonably priced lodgings in villages such as Brione and Gerra – you may just be the only visitors in the valley.

Ski crowd-free

If you like your pistes crowd-free and your powder plentiful, the undercelebrated resorts of Adelboden (adelboden.ch), Andermatt (andermatt.ch) and Val D'Anniviers (sierre-anniviers.ch) are where you should point your ski tips. Quaint weathered chalets and barns are the norm here, rather than shiny hotels and busy bars, and while the marked runs are mainly in the intermediate range, there's a wealth of off-piste action in trees, powder fields and long, north-facing valleys which hold their snow beautifully. Andermatt – where Elvis learned to ski, fact fans – recently caught the eye of Egyptian tycoon Samih Sawiris. He has very commercial plans for its future, so don't delay – get there while it's, er, cold.

Arty architecture

For all their yodelling, alpenhorns and cowbells, the Swiss are no slouches when it comes to pushing the boundaries of design and architecture. Barely a year has passed of late without some ultramodern landmark building springing up – whether on an idyllic mountainside, as in the case of Mario Botta's tiny but striking 1996 church of San Giovanni Battistta in Mogno, or in the heart of a city, such as Frank Gehry's Novartis Campus building, which opened in Basel in 2009, and Renzo Piano's seductively undulating Zentrum Paul Klee (paulkleezentrum.ch) of 2005 in Bern. Most recently, the Rolex Learning Centre (rolexlearningcenter.ch) in Lausanne, a spaceship of a building by Japanese architects SANAA won Wallpaper* magazine's Best New Public Building award 2011.

Diamond digs

Switzerland's diversity is reflected as much in the range of accommodation as anywhere else. Where do you fancy hanging your hat? In Lausanne's 19th-century Château d'Ouchy (+41 21 331 3232, chateaudouchy.ch, rooms from £235), in a Mongolian yurt high above Lake Geneva on the edge of Rochers de Naye (goldenpass.ch) 2,000m above sea level, or in the unique La Claustra, (+41 91 880 5055, schau-mal.com), a luxury hotel in a converted artillery bunker bored deep into the San Gottardo mountain. At the other end of the scale, and a comfort to those fearing the all-slaying power of today's Swiss franc, the country's hostels are among the world's best – take a bow Grindelwald (youthhostel.ch), recently voted the world's cleanest. And stays in the haylofts of working farms (bauernhof-ferien.ch), starting at as little as £7 a night, are proof that for all its banking muscle and corporate polish, Switzerland is still more than happy to share its rustic roots.

Life in the slow lane

While tour operators such as Black Tomato (blacktomato.co.uk) and Swiss Safari (swisssafari.com) offer sports cars to rent if you want to cruise some great driving roads in millionaire style, those who prefer their transport low-carbon also qualify for superstar treatment. SwitzerlandMobility (schweizmobil.ch), an organisation promoting non-motorised traffic, has created local, regional and national networks of signposted routes for hikers, cyclists, mountain bikers, roller skaters and canoeists. Many routes are integrated with public transport so you can cover plenty of ground, there are options for bike rental, overnight accommodation and transport of luggage, and you can plan your next move on the go with an iPhone app.

Express yourself

"Sorry I'm late – my train was delayed," is a not an excuse you tend to hear in Switzerland. And apart from being the centrepiece of the country's mind-bogglingly efficient integrated transport system, the Swiss rail network includes some of the most dazzling routes on the planet. Linking Chur with Tirano, just over the border in Italy, and fitted with panoramic windows, the Bernina Express (rhb.ch/Bernina-Express) rises on an old stone viaduct to pass forests, plunging cliffs and the Morteratsch glacier, taking in 55 tunnels, 196 bridges and a peak altitude of 2253m. It's only the third railway route in the world to have Unesco world heritage status.

• This article was amended on 11 October 2011 to correct the original version which stated the ski resort of Val d'Anniviers was in the Bernese Oberland. It is in Valais

Sir George Gilbert Scott, the unsung hero of British architecture | Simon Jenkins

The Sheet — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 10:22:53 +0000

The restoration of the St Pancras hotel should remind us of Scott, who towered over his profession yet has no biography

I remember it as a rat-infested dump. Water dripped down walls. Wires hung from ceilings. Pigeons colonised turrets and rafters. Gormenghast could not do justice to the profile of that destitute old lady, slumped at the far end of Euston Road. Poor St Pancras hotel embodied the contempt of modernism for anything old, stylish, romantic and, above all, Victorian. The place should be left to rot, an example to any who might find beauty in antiquity or economy in restoration.

Thirty years ago I staged a "flash" party in the derelict staircase of St Pancras, to draw attention to its plight. British Rail and its architects had fought for years to demolish it in favour of a new King's Cross in the style of Euston. So we crammed the flights of steps with rail enthusiasts, put trumpeters on the landings and toasted the old lady with champagne. Valiant campaigners from the Victorian Society led by John Betjeman and others had managed to get the building listed, but at the time it seemed at risk of collapse. Nobody cared.

Last month St Pancras hotel finally reopened to defy the forces of darkness. It is restored to its old magnificence, courtesy of three noble firms, London and Continental, Manhattan Lofts and Marriott hotels. The finest booking hall in Europe clinks with cocktails. The murals on the old staircase throb with colour. Arches leap across corridors and gilt drips from vaulting. Victorian restaurants, bedrooms and bars are booked solid. Sometimes, just sometimes, beauty wins.

By happy coincidence, next week also marks the bicentenary of the birth of the creator of St Pancras, Sir George Gilbert Scott. He was the most prolific architect of his age, and possibly of all time, and also the most unsung. His works spanned the empire, from New Zealand to Newfoundland. In England alone, he designed 800 buildings and oversaw hundreds more restorations. He produced churches, schools, hospitals, workhouses, asylums and vicarages galore. He has 607 structures listed as historic, more than any other architect (next is Lutyens, with 402), including the Albert Memorial, the Foreign Office, Edinburgh Cathedral and the universities of Glasgow and Bombay. Scott restored 18 of the 26 English medieval cathedrals. From his office his grandson, Giles, designed Liverpool Cathedral, Battersea power station, red phone boxes and what is now Tate Modern. Scott towered over his profession, yet he has no biography.

At least the Victorian Society has done him the honour of a celebratory magazine, adorned with a picture of Scott's great colonnade at Bombay university in rich Venetian gothic. The issue is more than a hymn of praise. It seeks to explain the role of taste in governing the changing appreciation of historic style. For decades, as Ian Dungavell points out, Scott was seen as a vandal, "the bête noire of the society for the protection of ancient buildings", for what was seen as his over-restoration of medieval churches. This helped fuel hostility to Victorian architecture through most of the 20th century. When Scott died, his enemy William Morris hailed "the happily dead dog".

The Victorian Society has recovered Scott's reputation not as a destroyer of old buildings but as their scholarly rescuer. He was a meticulous lover of medieval architecture, reinstating hundreds of medieval churches in the manner in which he envisaged their builders had intended. He confronted an Anglican inheritance that had been neglected and was on the verge of collapse. He had to rebuild Chichester cathedral tower after it actually fell down, and used hydraulic rams to prop up St Albans Abbey.

As Gavin Stamp points out, "Scott treated buildings with careful, loving respect and intuitive structural knowledge", so as to put them back to the use for which they were designed. At one derelict site after another, he had his assistants comb the ground to find fragments of medieval stone to re-erect and copy. He was a devoted follower of Pugin, giving him pride of place in the parade of architects on the Albert Memorial, with his own profile carved, diminutive, behind him. Morris's attack was unfair. Scott merely rejected Morris's authenticity of material in favour of authenticity of style. Had it not been for him, hundreds of English churches would today be ruins, stabilised in the picturesque wreckage beloved of the old ministry of works, with fragmented walls and gaunt gables set in immaculate government lawns.

Scott was certainly a partial gothicist. His argument with Palmerston in 1858 over the design for a new Foreign Office in Whitehall saw an epic "battle of the styles". Palmerston pitted his imperial classicism against Scott's city-state medievalism. The plans passed through a compromise byzantine before coming to rest on the present Italian renaissance. Rarely was meaning in architecture subjected to such furious public debate, battle being joined in the press and in parliament, those being the days. A Tory minister, Geoffrey Rippon, tried to demolish the building as "obsolete" in 1963 but was stopped.

I love St Pancras but see Scott's Albert Memorial as a more exquisite masterpiece. Restored by English Heritage in 1998, it is England's Taj Mahal, encasing the golden statue of Victoria's departed Albert in a soaring shrine in honour of western civilisation. Promenaders arriving at the Albert Hall next week should turn awhile from that pompous bosom of a building and admire this supreme work of gothic art. Catch it above all as an imperial sun sets across Kensington Gardens.

What the neglect of Scott illustrates is how fickle is the eye of fashion. The dirt that came to encase his buildings, much of whose appeal lay in ornament and colour, was mistaken for ugliness. His attempt to rescue old buildings was seen as philistine, and judged worthless. Anything to do with the medieval revival was regarded as pastiche. The contrasting blank facades and unadorned interiors of 20th-century modernism were seen as clean, socialist and virtuous.

All architecture is a pastiche of something, none more so than today's "neo-modernist" revival. Scott was wholly up to date in his use of such materials as steel, concrete, plate glass and the technology of steam. He even put a modern bathroom on each floor at St Pancras. But he understood the spiritual exhilaration of the vertical line, the pointed arch and the soaring turret. In an age of relentless novelty, he understood that architecture could reassure people, that buildings could perform new uses yet offer comfort in continuity.

What was sad in the campaign to save St Pancras was the absence from it of Scott's own profession of architect, to which anything old is a nuisance and anything new is a fee. Anyone wishing to see what today's architects preferred need only trot down the road to Euston station, a building with no respect for any style past or present, indeed with no sense of visual delight at all. I gather it is to be demolished. I have struggled to see Euston as the St Pancras of our age but failed. If there is a "save Euston" society being formed, I am afraid it is not for me.

• This article was amended on 12 July 2011. The original said Sir Giles Gilbert Scott was the son of Sir George Gilbert Scott. This has been corrected.

Simon Jenkins

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Museum peace: Japan’s Naoshima island

The Sheet — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 23:05:34 +0000

The "art island" of Naoshima is dotted with calming concrete installations a world away from Tokyo's frenetic pace. Pico Iyer enjoys a moment of serenity

Japanese cool has, for decades now, been associated with everything fast, hi-tech and jangly; it's the TVs on taxi dashboards, the control-panels on toilets, the underground universes around major train stations that keep buzzing even after a natural calamity that stunned the rest of us. And if you're looking for a world-defining Japanese art form, you're more likely to turn these days to anime and manga than to any of the country's classical painters or mock-European forms. So it was shocking for me to go to the sleepy, faraway island of Naoshima – now turned into an "art island" rich with museums and installations – and find the coolest thing I've seen in my 24 years of living in Japan. It was, in some ways, the reverse of technology.

The structures around Naoshima are super-hi-tech, 23rd-century constructions of grey reinforced concrete, with every next-generation innovation; but they take you back to the principles of spareness, simplicity and concentration that graced the haiku, brush-and-ink paintings and Noh dramas of old. Where technology makes you speedy, up-to-the-minute and all-over-the-place, Naoshima so calms, grounds and slows you that you feel as if you've stepped into a meditative shrine.

The journey to the old fishermen's haunt in the Seto Naikai, or Inland Sea, is like a journey through the past. I set out from my home in Nara on a brilliant late-autumn afternoon, the trees blazing red, gold and radiant yellow all around me. To get to the remote island involved a bus, a train, another train to Kyoto, a bullet-train to Okayama and then another local train, a slow ferry and a bus before, five hours later, I arrived at Naoshima's Benesse House, the showpiece hotel where I was staying. With each change of vehicle, modernity seemed to thin out a little and I was closer to the old. By the time I left Okayama, I was in the middle of a much earlier Japan of unmanned ticket offices and deserted piers. The faces were simpler here – two local girls, swathed in grey earmuffs, had the countenances of Noh masks – and there were few signs in English.

The train from Okayama clanked along, the opposite of a bullet train, stopping at an empty platform every two or three minutes, and as we inched past, I could see regiments of uniform houses, with grey tiled roofs, bunched against a hillside, smoke rising from the rice-paddies in front of them. By the time we arrived at the ferry town of Uno, I could hardly recall the Godiva coffee-shops and high-rises of Kyoto.

When I reached Naoshima itself, I began to feel as if I'd stepped out of time altogether, in a world so deep in the past – and so far ahead in the future – that I lost all sense of when I was. Benesse House is a stylish and sleek construction, with Bose CD players on every desk – but no TVs or internet reception – and each room individually designed by the self-taught Osaka architect Tadao Ando. Its corridors are full of original contemporary canvasses and eerie light sculptures projecting classic Japanese landscapes through the near-dark. And the effect of all the modern art is, oddly, to take you back to the transfixing simplicity of an old ryokan, or traditional inn, where simply watching the sun make stripes across the tatami mats, or figures cast silhouettes against the paper windows, becomes so absorbing you never want to leave your room.

After the Benesse Company, a publishing firm centered in Okayama, took over the southern half of the island in 1985, working with the then-mayor Chikatsugu Miyake, it called in the minimalist Ando and invited him to design a huge swatch of natural park to be an international centre of art. Rising to the opportunity – surely any architect's dream – he opened Benesse House in 1992, then created a Benesse House Museum (with hotel rooms on the second and third floors) up the road, and then built what is now known as the Oval, a James Bondian series of six more rooms for guests on the top of a mountain behind the museum, reached by private monorail. In 2004, he completed the Chichu Museum which is a 20-minute walk away.

In all my 50 years I've never seen a place as pure and elevating as the Chichu, and it speaks for the pristine futurism that makes Naoshima such a unique place. There are five major pieces – a set of Monet water lilies, a large chamber with a reflecting 6ft granite sphere at its centre by the American land artist Walter de Maria and three light installations by the American James Turrell. Rather than observing these pieces, though, you more or less inhabit them. In one Turrell piece – Open Field – you walk into a room flooded with an unearthly orange light. Then, one at a time, you step up some stairs and into another large room suffused in soothingly deep blue light. Turn around, and the people in the room behind look like art works. Turn back, and you're in a kind of dream state.

Ten minutes walk from the Chichu, I came upon a new museum, opened only last year, to show off the works of the Korean-born Lee Ufan, again in a tall, grey, windowless Ando construction in a field. One of the pieces there, a single rock placed in front of a great earth-coloured slab, with a light shining on it, looked like a moving representation of a figure praying. Walking back from there towards Benesse House, I passed 88 buddhas along the side of the road made from industrial waste. A huge cube sat on a beach, and a "Cultural Melting Bath" hot tub on the cliffs above. At one point, on the silent road framed by glowing trees and the Inland Sea, I realised I could hear water lapping against the shore from two different beaches, each in a different key.

The protected spaces and air of discerning clarity mark every detail in Naoshima. There are no pachinko parlours on the small island of 3,600 people, no video arcades, no clamorous department stores. Cars are rare and you can walk from one site to the very farthest in about an hour. If you look out to sea, you can watch the fishing boats slowly drifting to one of the quiet neighbouring islands; when you head into one of the museums, sometimes slipping off your shoes before entering a room, you're in a prayerful hush again.

While Benesse House is clearly the classic place to stay, budget-minded travellers can sleep in one of 10 Mongolian yurts on the beach 10 minutes' walk away, for less than £30 a night, or in various family-run minshuku, or guest houses, among the island's villages.

In one 18th-century village, Honmura, 30 minutes' walk from Benesse House, six old wooden houses showcase the most contemporary of modern art works. Everywhere you look in Naoshima, the locals, and visiting artists, are coming up with new projects. There's the "I ❤ YU" bathhouse in the port town of Miyanoura – where you bathe surrounded by a zany, eclectic "scrapbook" of work, including an aeroplane cockpit and a collage of erotica – and the Miaow Shima café in Honmura where you can sip coffee among a dozen sleeping cats.

Naoshima is not like anything in the west, but more an ultra-cool reference and homage to what Japan has been doing all along, in cutting away distraction and using frames and light and silence to still the mind and train one in attention.

And at a time when the modern nation has absorbed such a series of shocks, and is thinking about what grounds and steadies it, it makes more sense than ever to seek out this forward-looking shrine to the past.

Essentials

Doubles at Benesse House (00 81 87 892 2030; benesse-artsite.jpen/benessehouse) cost from £246 per night. Yurts on the beach (Tsutsuji-so Lodge, 00 81 87 892 2838; tsutsujiso.no-blog.jp/english) cost £28 per person per night. To get to Naoshima, take the bullet-train to Okayama and a local train to Uno, followed by a 20-minute ferry ride

Pico Iyer is the author of The Lady and The Monk, a novel about the first 24 years he has spent living in Japan

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Obama DJ and Jamie Cullum launch £200m St Pancras hotel

The Sheet — Thu, 05 May 2011 23:05:08 +0000

Development by Manhattan Loft Corporation and Renaissance chain marries US corporate style with Victorian Gothic

St Pancras International. The name of London's most charismatic railway station is no idle boast. And it isn't just that trains scythe from here to continental Europe at about 200mph. Non, madame – I mean, no siree.

The £200m, 245-bedroom, five-star hotel fronting the station, which was officially opened on Thursday night, has been developed by a team led by Harry Handelsman, founder of the Manhattan Loft Corporation, with the Renaissance chain of hotels owned by Marriott, the company founded by J Willard Marriott in 1927, when this Mormon missionary and his wife opened a root beer stand in Washington DC.

So, it was no great surprise to find the great iron and glass lobbies of the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel resounding to hip-hop, psychedelic and soul sounds conjured by DJ Cassidy, who played at President Barack Obama's inaugural ball in 2009. Earlier in the evening, Jamie Cullum tickled the ivories for the hotel's 2,000 guests.

The decor of the new hotel is an extraordinary marriage of US corporate style and reinvented 19th-century English Victorian Gothic. Into this improbable mix, and between generous floral displays, guests can find a fine collection of contemporary art including works by Donald Judd, Joseph Beuys, Richard Prince and Gary Hume.

It all needs a little fine-tuning, yet this architectural phantasmagoria is, without doubt, one of the most remarkable hotels in the world. Where else can you look from your bed through a vast Gothic window inspired by some of the great medieval churches and cloth halls of northern Europe and watch eel-like electric trains slither out from under a sky-blue Victorian train shed?

Originally opened on 5 May 1873, the many-towered and spired Midland Grand Hotel was not just "too good for its purpose", as its architect George Gilbert Scott claimed, but altogether too grand to turn a profit.

Closed in 1935, there was much derision for this fairytale building where drainpipes running down the lobby walls feature lions spouting stylised iron water from their fierce mouths while dragons bite their ears. Its existence was threatened before its salvation came when Eurostar trains were directed to St Pancras.

Today, the hotel and the station, which was rebuilt at a cost of £800m and reopened in 2007, are working together once again.

St Pancras station is now a mighty concatenation of flats, shops, bedrooms, trains, restaurants and restored public spaces, unmatched for its sheer complexity and architectural chutzpah by any other railway terminus.

It has taken more than a decade to complete, cost at least £1bn and oozes energy, ambition, high Victorian romance, modern comfort, artistry, kitsch and charm. Oh, and pets are allowed. Great Danes, Irish Wolfhounds or even Hounds of the Baskervilles.

"There is simply no crowd I can't move," said DJ Cassidy, "and there is no better feeling than that."

Gilbert Scott might have been able to claim the very same thing, along with a little help from a trainload of modern architects, conservationists, engineers, financiers and hoteliers.

And, if Obama ever needs a London hideaway, the hotel boasts its very own £8,000 a night presidential suite, complete with its own butler (but no DJ). If the newly complete, new-look St Pancras has one glaring fault, it's this: its attractions – from a new Marcus Wareing restaurant named after Gilbert Scott himself to a bar in the linenfold-panelled former booking hall – could easily make you miss your train.

Jonathan Glancey

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St Pancras Renaissance Hotel: The rebirth of a gothic masterpiece

The Sheet — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 14:51:29 +0000

George Gilbert Scott's landmark hotel above St Pancras station has been sumptuously restored after generations of neglect

It is nearly a century since the Midland Grand hotel, the Victorian palace attached to St Pancras station, last flourished, and 76 years since it was a hotel at all. It is almost a half-century since the struggle began to rescue it from oblivion, 26 years since it had any full-time use and five since construction started to return it to its original purpose as a luxury hotel, now with some apartments attached. On 14 March the first guests will enter the St Pancras Renaissance hotel, as it is now called, where the rooms will cost from £250 a night in a modern extension, up to the many-roomed Royal Suite for £10,000. It will have cost £200m of construction to get this far.

Meanwhile, it has stood, like the weird house of a crazy old lady in some village, unmissable, spooky and inaccessible. The life of the city swirls around it and under it, in and out of some of the busiest train and underground stations in Europe. It has been possible to see inside on the occasional tour, and its interiors have been shown worldwide to unknowing millions, as locations for Harry Potter, 102 Dalmatians, Batman, Richard III and other films requiring lavish gothic creepiness. Now, its restoration nearly complete, it feels like both a lost world and something familiar, that has always been part of the furniture of London.

Inside, it is a thing of movement, a web of stairs and endless corridors. Even the coffee room, one of its most splendid interiors, is built on a radiused curve, like a railway viaduct, as if you had not quite left a train carriage. Then, as if unsettled by instability, it is fixed with history. Medieval architecture is imported by the hundreds of tons, to ballast the risky Victorian world of capital and industry, of bank crashes and train crashes.

Palaces and churches are evoked with pointed arches and ogees, bunches of colonettes, carvings of flowers and fruit, trefoils and quatrefoils. The materials include granite, alternating pink and white stone and wrought iron. The decoration, as it would have been in medieval buildings, is as dazzling as it can be: within a square foot or two, you can find royal blue, vermilion, gold, green, pink and a mustardy yellow. Great floral splodges march across the wallpaper like space invaders. Its looping, swooping, theatrical main staircase is decorated with 2,300 fleurs-de-lis. There are paintings of the Virtues and of a chaste love scene from the Roman de la Rose, perhaps antidotes to the potential lustfulness of a hotel.

It is both magnificent and a little demented. With its churchy aura, it feels uncomfortable with its own hedonism. Although its imagery is of nature and springtime, it feels a touch clammy and stifling. While admiring it, you can see why people in the early 20th century reacted against this kind of thing, in favour of simpler, fresher, less pretentious spaces.

When it was completed, the Midland Grand was the last and grandest of the railway hotels built to serve passengers at major termini and to act as an advertisement for them. It was designed for the Midland Railway by the prolific George Gilbert Scott, architect of dozens of churches, Glasgow University, the Albert Memorial and the Foreign Office, and for whom the project was the fulfilment of his greatest dream, to design a great gothic public building in London. For him, the making of this monument went beyond mere uses; it was almost "too good for its purpose," he said.

Its innovations included lifts, fireproof construction and a generous supply of flushing lavatories, but these were not enough to defend it from the competition when newer hotels introduced things the Midland Grand did not have, such as ensuite bathrooms. In the 20th century, it declined, until it closed in 1935. After the war, it housed various offices of British Rail, which carved up its interiors with partitions and suspended ceilings. Seen as obsolete, inefficient and tasteless, it was threatened with demolition. It took campaigns by John Betjeman and others to save both the hotel and the great shed of St Pancras station – now the Eurostar terminus – behind.

Its eventual rescue is the work of Harry Handelsman and his property company, Manhattan Loft Corporation, London and Continental Railways and Marriott Hotels, working with the architects RHWL and Richard Griffiths, and the close attention of English Heritage. The prodigiously successful hedge-fund manager (Lord) Stanley Fink put many of his millions behind it. Of all these, the driving force is Handelsman, for whom it has become an obsession. He increased his stake when other partners fell away, nervous of a complicated, risky project in an unproved location. Now he describes himself as the "custodian" of the building.

He freely admits that the budget "spiralled" and wears the cost as a badge of honour. When a fragment of rare wallpaper was found in one room, it was reinstated at a cost of £47,000 for the single room. He says that he "wanted to go the extra mile, even though it cost tens of millions". He is confident that he will "recoup his investment, because it will be the most beautiful hotel in London". His cheerful air suggests he is not being driven to bankruptcy by an architectural folly.

The genius of the project lies in its deal-making and risk-taking, the stacking up of partnerships, funding and uses such that it can, for the first time since the early 1920s, be a going concern. It has cost no public money since English Heritage supported the restoration of the exterior in the early 1990s.

With this history go some compromises. The restoration lacks an overall concept of how the old relates to the new, such as was possible, for example, in the state-funded, not-for-profit Neues Museum in Berlin. It feels more like a series of individual decisions than something with a guiding intelligence. A new wing to the rear, housing 189 bedrooms, is clad in a modern version of Scott's red-brick gothic by restoration specialists Richard Griffiths Architects. This is among the best of its kind, confident and not completely imitative, but it sits oddly with the modern, standardised block it covers.

The relationship with Marriott, which vetted every detail from its headquarters in Washington DC, causes awkwardness, as the corporate world seems to have lost its taste for fantasy since the days of the Midland Railway. Sometimes, Scott's individualism collides with ubiquitous international hoteliana. Worst is the fitted carpet in the corridors, whose architecture demands something with a less domestic quality: it is like socks worn with a ballgown and its space-killing squishiness makes my flesh creep.

But these are details compared to the far more significant fact that one of the country's architectural marvels is returning to life. That it is doing so, after so many decades and obstacles, shows the power of fantasy in cities. Usually, everyone bemoans building projects that take a long time and run over budget, but here nobody, not even those writing the cheques, seems to mind.

Rowan Moore

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Nicolas Sarkozy offers France’s heritage sites to hotel chains

The Sheet — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 00:00:57 +0000

Nicolas Sarkozy's plan to rent out L'hôtel de la Marine on Place de la Concorde, linked to the revolution, angers historians

Paris boasts so many historic monuments it has been called a living museum. But now Nicolas Sarkozy is under attack for seeking to sell the capital's heritage to luxury hotel chains.

Historians are outraged at government plans to rent out one of France's most important palaces, L'hôtel de la Marine on Place de La Concorde.

A symbol of the nation's bloody history, the palace was the site of the first riots that led to the French revolution in 1789. King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were guillotined outside it.

Designed by the architect Ange-Jacques Gabriel, it is one of the best examples of 18th-century royal architecture and its intact collection of furniture and decor is unrivalled, even by the palace of Versailles. But the state-owned building could be transformed into luxury boutiques, plush suites for billionaires or a hotel with swimming pool.

Last month a discreet advert was posted on the site of the French budget ministry advertising the building for long-term lease to private firms which will be encouraged to renovate it.

The French navy, based in the building since the revolution, will leave in 2014 for more modern headquarters. The government has complained it cannot afford the upkeep of the listed landmark, with its hundreds of rooms and grandiose courtyards.

In an open letter to the French president, published by Le Monde newspaper, a group of influential historians said they were "revolted" by the plan to "flog" the palace and reduce it to a "commercial circus".

Sarkozy, who is under fire for building a much-maligned museum of French history, has often complained the country has lost its memory and connection with the past. "France has not lost its memory, it is selling it!" the historians raged.

The former president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing has joined the protest. Art experts are concerned the rent deal, billed as an open contest, is a stitch-up favouring a multinational finance group advised by a former culture minister. The applications process closes next week.

In a drive to develop French heritage sites, an abandoned outbuilding of the palace of Versailles is to be transformed into a luxury 23-room hotel by a Belgian company. The palace of Fontainbleau, south of Paris, will ask for bids to convert its listed barracks.

Angelique Chrisafis

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