Clare Press stays at the Starck-designed Cache Boutique Hotel, an international fashionista favourite…
We do not travel, of course, to experience the familiar. That said, there is something comforting about bunking down in a thoroughly modern pied a terre when visiting a city as crazily confusing, polluted and exasperating as Shanghai can be. The Philippe Starck designed Cache Boutique hotel, housed in a converted downtown art deco building, is just that.
This modernist bolthole is a boutique haven with all the trimmings: the air conditioning always works, the sheets are super-soft cotton and the staff brings you champagne as you check your emails in the dimly lit lounge. Incidentally, said lounge carries W, German Vogue, the US edition of Harper’s Bazaar and Numero for the modern fashionista’s jet-setter magazine needs.
In the suites, the feeling that you could be anywhere intensifies. Manhattan (or a scene from the film Boogie Nights) comes to mind as you sink into the minutely mosaic-ed gold bathtub – there are no windows in the smallest room to tell you otherwise. In the bar fridge lurks champagne from France and chocolates from America – you have to open a cupboard to find evidence of your Asian location. Here, noodle bowls are stacked.
These generously sized rooms are decorated in that distinctly Starkian melange of modern dark wood veneer and witty, talking point furniture – two giant Perspex chess pieces guard the giant entertainment unit (with its draw filled with the latest DVD movies), while the lamps are shaped like space ships. By the telephones (they are all over the joint, along with multiple internet connections) little red notebooks printed with golden Mao graphics await your memos…ah, so this is China after all; you knew it!
But then you’re in the hotel’s swish Italian restaurant, Issimo, munching on wood-fired pizza, and you could be anywhere in the world.
Find Cache Boutique at 931 West Nanjing Road, Shanghai, 31 200041 China. Telephone +86 21 6217 9000. Visit http://www.cachethotels.com/
