Hybrid hotel-coworking firm Zoku, which has four hotels in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Paris and Vienna, has hired Matthew Parsons as an official writer in residence in Paris.
What he produces might be an insight into hotel guests and how they act when they are away from their normal world.
According to a news release from the Dutch firm, Parsons will be tasked with interviewing residents, coworkers, staff and visitors; observing “how shared spaces foster a balanced environment for living, working and socializing” and documenting “how community events contribute to well-being and shape the overall experience.”
Zoku’s idea is not an obscure one. One hotel in Paris, L’Hôtel — a disciplined paucity of written characters, there — has a proud tradition of hosting writers.
L’Hôtel was where Oscar Wilde finished his plays “An Ideal Husband” and “The Importance of Being Earnest.” It's also where Wilde died, although the hotel then was known as the Hôtel d'Alsace and was not anywhere close in style to being the luxurious address it is today.
It was in his room in that hotel, the former guise of that hotel, where Wilde wrote one of his famous quips: “The wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One of us has got to go.”
Wilde came to Paris to get away from England, which had imprisoned him for his sexual orientation.
Only last week it was announced that the jail in which he spent his incarceration, Reading Gaol in Berkshire, will be converted into a hotel following a £100 million ($130 million) renovation and overhaul.
L’Hôtel has a bar called Wilde’s.
The hotel had been revamped to glory by the end of 1960s when it provided a home for Argentine maestro Jorge Luis Borges, a hugely prolific writer whose stories and poems in English are mostly in titles named “Collected Writings,” or some such. I once saw his small passport photo — he’s second to the left in the top row of the accompanying photo — among 500 or so others in a photographer’s shop on a side road in Buenos Aires.
Borges moved into L’Hôtel because of his admiration for Wilde, and a plaque to one side of the hotel’s entrance commemorating Borges’ presence there parallels a plaque on the other side commemorating Wilde's.
In the Sun Valley Lodge in Idaho, an innovative marketer invited Nobel Laureate Ernest Hemingway in 1939 to be its writer in residence to help promote the new resort and, according to the local tourism bureau, it was there he finished his novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” The hotel is still open today.
Another famous hotel with a writer connection is The Old Cataract Aswan Hotel in Egypt. That is where Agatha Christie lived and penned her novel “Death on the Nile” in 1933. The hotel also still exists. Egyptian firm Talaat Mostafa Group owns what is now called the Sofitel Legend Old Cataract Aswan.
Sofitel, of course, is an Accor brand, and Accor is based in Paris.
That pen points back to Zoku.
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