In The Way We Were's famous closing scene, Barbra Streisand's Katie bumps into her ex, Robert Redford's Hubble, and his new, demure, blond girlfriend, in front of New York's Plaza Hotel on a blustery fall day. "Your girl is lovely, Hubble," she says magnanimously, brushing aside a windblown strand of his flaxen hair with a begloved hand. (Unfortunately, I seem to run into exes with, say, a 7-Eleven, a bum, and maybe a garbage can in the background.) That may be because I don't live in a '70s Hollywood romance set to Streisand's swelling misty watercoloured vocals, and also because, sadly, Toronto doesn't have its own version of the Plaza. Every city needs that kind of fabled, cinematic hotel, where sad rendezvous feel glamorous because they happen in front of a grand marquee and debauchery has all the glitz of a Fitzgerald novel because it happens in a marbled ballroom.
Montreal's --and Canada's --answer to that sort of storied property is the Ritz-Carlton. Perched in Montreal's boutique-laced Golden Square Mile, the grande dame of Sherbrooke Street was the first Ritz Carlton in the world, and has played majestic host to a ridiculously long list of glamourati: stars (Paul Newman, Sophia Loren, and Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, who had their first wedding there), French presidents (Charles de Gaulle), royalty (Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip) and the Shah of Iran).
The hotel, which first opened in 1912, was designed by New York architecture firm Warren ... Wetmore (it also divined Grand Central Station). The palazzo-style neo-classical pile has temporarily shut its opulent doors to undergo a massive 15-month, $100-million reno that will see 130 cushier rooms, 34 residences and 15 condo hotel suites. (Construction is slated to begin this winter.) While the Ritz-Carlton is being escorted into a swankier present, many of its old-fashioned hallmarks (such as its original white-shuttered marquee) will be carefully restored. The hotel lobby will feature one of Cesar Ritz's requisite design features: a coiling Cinderella staircase in the lobby (originally fashioned so that female guests, bedecked in their finest, could make dramatic entrances and be properly admired by their suitors waiting below).
"A lot of Montrealers see the Ritz as a kind of a shrine," says Montreal designer Patty Xenos, who is fashioning the hotel's new residences. "It was the first building to be designed as a landmark. The ghosts of this building are incredible." The facade of the building, with all of its intricate, hand-carved detailing (a so-called pearl necklace and lace crown) will also be preserved. All of that artful stonework, Ms. Xenos remarks, decorates the top of the building. "This kind of building wasn't designed to be seen from a passing car, the way we might see it today. It was meant to be appreciated from afar. You would notice the cornice above the treeline as you'd approach it slowly from your horse-drawn carriage."
In taking on this project, Ms. Xenos determined to spoil the mod new condos and residences with the same kind of decadent touches that defined the hotel's first incarnation, reimagining some classic features to suit the contemporary glamourpuss. The residential lobby will feel like a precious, light-glutted jewel box: floors will be round-cut inlaid marble (a nod to the hotel's original flooring); ceilings will be gleaming silver-leaf; instead of a trad chandelier, there will be what looks like a rain cloud of dangling crystal droplets ("I wanted the ghost of a chandelier," she explains) and sleek columns (as opposed to the standard Doric variety) will moonlight as lampposts, their faces made of hand-carved light-refracting crystal.
The suites -- ranging from 1,060 to 5,640 square feet -- will also cosset its residences with every (un)imaginable flourish. "With any great building, every detail has a story. We tried to bring back that tradition," Ms. Xenos says. When the hotel's eastern facade was torn down for the reno, cornices and emblems were saved from the rubble, and will make their way (mounted or framed) into the residential lobbies. "It's history as art," says Ms. Xenos.
Of her overarching esthetic philosophy, she offers: "I was truly allergic to trends. The minute a
trend appears, it's already over." Among those defining details: heavy, castle-befitting eight-foot doors ("I didn't want anyone to go to Rona or Home Depot to buy a door frame!" says Ms. Xenos), herringbone-patterned marble flooring in the living areas, and service elevators with secret passageways that usher caterers, dog walkers, nannies, shrinks on house-calls, private kabbalah instructors, etc., into the kitchen, as if magically ("That's five-star living! Service has to be invisible," laughs Ms. Xenos). Cleverly designed to combat wind-savaged, sun-deprived Montreal winters, Poggenpohl kitchens are panelled with windows (dressed in fresh, white shutters) and the feel-good backsplash is its own light-therapy system. The panel, an LED-source, is meant to stand-in for sunlight, reproducing all the colours of the rainbow in lulling succession. (NASA developed this kind of therapy to help rescue space-bound astronauts from depression.) Another (better!) cure for depression: Move into the Montreal Ritz.
Article written by Olivia Stren, National Post - published October 25, 2008
Visit CondominiumHotels.com for more information on Ritz-Carlton Montreal
Posts
