I attended the official opening celebration of a London hotel Monday.
The event was originally scheduled for 2020, when the hotel actually opened, but the pandemic got in the way of that. Twelve months later, we gathered to enjoy the hospitality of hotel management company Starboard Hotels and its new Hampton by Hilton London Park Royal.
The 162-room hotel is in an Art Deco building, which is listed, meaning that it is officially recorded as being of high architectural merit and thus not able to be altered without express permission.
Three things caught my attention, other than the fact it is a fun hotel. Hampton by Hilton continues to surprise me in how well consumers have stayed with the brand in the United Kingdom. The Hampton by Hilton London Park Royal was particularly welcoming and enjoyable without being fussy.
The first thing of note is the hotel's location. My knowledge of West London is limited — I come from the People’s Republic of Southeast London — and the areas of Park Royal, Perivale and Hangers Lane might as well be Paraguay, Papua New Guinea and Haiti to me. This isn't surprising when London — the center and Greater London — covers some 600 square miles or more.
I had never exited the Underground at Hangar Lane Station, and it is mostly Art Deco in style, too. Park Royal — its station is even more Art Deco — is where the first-ever rugby Test Match between England and Australia took place in 1908, or so I was told at the party.
Perivale is just a wonderful-sounding name for a town and contains the Hoover Factory, where vacuum cleaners were made, and which is probably the grandest Art Deco building in the country, one that is also listed and today contains residences.
Secondly, the Hampton by Hilton London Park Royal's lobby space features five pieces of beautiful stained glass of geometric design made by Starboard chairman Paul Callingham’s wife Jackie Callingham, who has won awards for her art, including one from the Society of British Interior Design.
The five pieces are roughly 5 feet by 3 feet and the intricacies of work are evident.
I took a stained-glass course some while ago and still have the piece I made. It's a stained-glass representation of a Pacific Northwest Haida First Nation’s depiction of a killer whale with a raven and shaman inside it taken from a journal written by Franz Boas, a German-American anthropologist who devised the idea of cultural relativism. Cultural relativism states no culture can be worse or better than any other, just different, which is a wonderful lesson for all of us to remember, and often.
Yes, I started off complicatedly, and realized too late the skill needed in glass-cutting, copper-foiling and soldering.
It took a while to complete.
The larger a length of glass, the easier it is to break it when one is supposedly tapping a line that has been etched into the glass by an awl or some kind of indentation tool.
Callingham’s work is beautiful, and even on the dullest day outside, light shines inside through stained glass, which will be a thing to cheer the heart.
At one point during the event, I spoke to Paul, a banker, and Julian Gallant, the local borough councilor for the ward of Ealing Broadway West, where the Hampton by Hilton London Park Royal is located.
Numerous times I have at the same time chatted with a hotel brand executive and a property owner. But I have never talked at the same time to the owner and operator, the banker that helped put into place the debt on the hotel and the politician that allowed zoning and planning tp proceed.
Since opening last year, the Hampton by Hilton London Park Royal has started to get traction. There are sufficient businesses in the area to help with occupancy, and there are a great number of contractors who need to stay in the area, too.
It is not yet getting the leisure business for central London, because due to the pandemic, rates at hotels in Central London have not reached their full potential.
When they do, hotels a little farther out but still well connected will experience a pickup in bookings.
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