Not every hotel has a grand history, so some are just making one up

The main function of a hotel is to provide somewhere safe and clean to lay your head.

But they are also worlds to themselves and some hotels spin tales that turn a stay into a theatrical event, involving fictional guests, imagined scenarios and atmospheric set-dressing.

I’ve noticed a trend for hoteliers to engage in “storytelling” about their hotels. Sometimes it’s the gathering of true stories that happened at the hotel, often involving famous people, which they share with guests.

Madame Reve, Paris. A story goes with it.Credit: Supplied

Those hotels that are known as “storied” – the Ritz in Paris or Raffles in Singapore, for instance – have been the centre of so many historic events and significant cultural moments that anyone who walks through their doors can’t help but be swept up in the narrative.

Both grand hotels have distinctive personalities, forged by history and location.

But what about a new hotel? How does it become something more than the thread-count of its sheets and a mini bar? How does it quickly get a personality?

Madame Reve has created its own history.Credit:

Make up a history, of course!

A few years ago, I stayed in two Paris hotels that were newly opened. Both were imaginative renovations of old buildings. And both, interestingly, were styled and named for fictional characters.

Madame Reve (meaning “madame dreams”) is a stylish hotel in the newly fashionable Bourse district, a gorgeous renovation of the old post office.

To attract a fashionable crowd, the hotelier, Laurence Taieb, created, along with a slew of designers and artisans, an elegant place where the fictional Madame Reve, based on well-travelled women he had known, would stay.

A silhouette of the non-existent Madame Reve is painted in gold leaf on the walls of the bar. Her presence is felt.

Not far away, near the Champs Elysees in the 8th district, London hotelier Anouska Hempel opened Monsieur George, a boutique hotel named for a fictional man-about-town, whom she imagined dressed in a fedora and velvet jacket, travelling the world and making observations in his crocodile-skin notebook.

She designed interiors for the hotel so that it was George’s personal bolthole, where he might be found lurking in his top hat behind any potted palm in the Moroccan-tiled salon.

The concept for both hotels was that they attracted guests who felt an affinity for these romantic characters. (I wondered at the time what would happen if the characters were introduced and went on a date – Hotel Baby George?)

In Los Feliz in California, there’s another hotel named after a fictional George.

The Hotel Covell is themed around the life of an invented George Covell, with each of the nine suites a “chapter” from his life story. Like the Parisian George, this one is also an adventurer – and maybe a bit of a roue - travelling through Morocco and other exotic locales and conceiving a daughter Isabel from a love affair in Paris.

In Palm Springs, The Parker hotel, once the former estate of “singing cowboy” Gene Autry, is inspired by the eccentric Aunty Mame-like Mrs Parker, who wanders around her beautiful mid-century house and lovely garden, cocktail in hand, musing on life’s whimsies.

She’s not real, either, but the invention of decorator and author Jonathan Adler and landscape designer Judy Kameon who reimagined the posh hotel as Mrs Parker’s personal estate, complete with croquet lawn.

The Peninsula hotel group opened its first Salon de Ning nightclub in New York in 2008 and later in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Manila.

Madame Ning, as you might guess, is also an imaginary character – a gadabout Shanghai socialite of the 1930s, invented in great detail by the Peninsula team, who filled the nightclubs with Ning’s art deco furniture, clothing, photographs and other personal items.

The Manila hotel is the only one in the group to still feature Ning’s salon, but they were glamorous dens that made guests feel as if they’d stepped into a Sing Song bar in old Shanghai.

It’s interesting that all the characters – the two madams, the Georges and Mrs Parker – are wealthy bohemians with a taste for adventure and the exotic. The hotels play into a nostalgia for the days of travel before it became democratised.

I think this is all great fun, especially when it’s done with wit and style.

I’d like to have known Mrs Parker and Madame Ning. That’s impossible, but at least I can sit in their chairs, play croquet in their gardens and relax with their favourite books.

The writer was a guest of Madame Reve and Monsieur George.