The Unstoppable Rise of Liverpool’s Gangster Chic

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We did one of those top ten lists for the Guardian the other day. Liverpool’s top ten hotels. We’ve got to be honest - we struggled after four. Yes, we’ve more beds now than ever. But, outside of the budget chains and the Signature Living swag, where’s the cool, calm and collected? Where are the hotels that show Liverpool as a cosmopolitan city that’s crisp, confident and cultured?

I’m conflicted about Signature Living (pics top and r). On the one hand it’s a successful Liverpool business - with a healthy Trip Advisor profile. Their Cavern Quarter pad came 14th in their Small Hotel awards this year, and gets great reviews for its product, kudos for that. But that it continues to offer a perfect facsimile of a particular Liverpool subset - and a ‘no such thing as too much’ world view - is sort of depressing.

Its fixation with padded headboards and baroque faff kits our city out as if it was a lunatic asylum for those who’ve insanely lost their heads after suddenly coming into new found riches. Like Michael Jackson left unattended in a mall. Or Alex Gerrard in Wilmslow.

Now Signature’s at it with 30 James Street - ‘the home of the Titanic’ (and we thought that was buried in the silt of the north Atlantic), and the £10 million Shankly Hotel in the council-vacated Millennium House.

We’ve yet to see what shape the Shankly theme park will take, but the old White Star HQ, on its open day, ruthlessly riffed on the same Signature Hotel theme of ‘luxury cushioned walls’ and rooms ‘each having its own unique theme related to the Titanic’.

Bagsy we get the room with the dirty big gash down the side, the cheap rivets and an en suite of corporate negligence, please. Oh, and to complete the theme, let’s hope they fail to provide enough fire extinguishers, should the worst happen.

Would it kill them to have a little more ambition, or inspiration? 30 James Street is less Golden Age of Travel and more last days of empire. There is no restraint (pic r). No realisation that there is more to the world than all the wonders that the Elaine Cunningham store can offer.

With no theme left untapped, no done-to-death chapter of the city’s backstory cynically mined, one imagines the only thing stopping the city from opening the Slave Trade Hotel is the fact that, for real authenticity, you’d have to forego the rococo headboards. And, come to think of it, the beds. They might keep the chains though, for a bit of Monqiue-edged titivation for the stag and hen crowd.

And while we’re at it, what is a luxury cushioned wall anyway? And who decided that was a hotel must have? We guess they come in handy when you’re barrelling down the corridors at four in the morning, giddy on thin prosecco from the Genting Casino.

Whatever the truth is about the bombed out church fiasco, one thing is certain: we should all pray thanks to our own personal deities that it didn’t happen. But it oh so nearly did. Joe and the council are obviously on personal terms with the Signature Living team, who’d planned to transform the unofficial war memorial to a wedding hotel, complete with a glass-walled banqueting suite - think Frozen meets Towie with confetti - and conversations must have reached an advanced stage - before the city said, ‘er, no thanks. We don’t want one of the city’s last unadulterated iconic buildings to be turned into a taffeta-lined tiara box.’

The twitter outcry came just in time for the council to wake up and change its mind - whilst pretending it was all just a bad dream, and they were never really serious. Oh no.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Smart hotels - from Brighton to Berlin, Stockholm (pic) to Sydney - are creating urban adventurelands where rooms are clever, contemplative and surprising, and where the design of the hotel says something about the DNA of the city. Says it’s willing to take chances, it engages with its emerging creative talent (rather than shipping in shit paintings), says it’s confident, forward looking, or maybe just fun. Just like, when it opened at the beginning of the century, Hope Street Hotel did.

Now, as the city’s about to welcome the world - to the International Festival of Business, the Biennial and the Giants - have we really (save for a couple of notable exceptions) got the hotels we deserve? Like Edinburgh’s cool Le Monde (pic)?

What does Hard Days Night’s godawful Shannon artwork say about us? Or the ‘sistine chapel ceilings’ of the Signature Hotel? What about the flotilla of themed narrow boats (Titanic included)- bobbing in the Albert Dock like the floating detritus of some recently-drowned children’s entertainer?

It says we’re a city that doesn’t know when to say stop with the swags. A city in love with what’s known as gangster chic. You know the sort - where all the furniture is new, even when it’s trying to look old. Where every surface is dripping with gold leaf, silk and Swarovski. And where historic buildings are fair game - and council approved - for a bit of Disneyfication.

Accumulating stuff that looks reasonable when assembled takes skill. It’s called design. Getting away with Gangster Chic takes skill, too, though, but the skill’s in keeping a straight face when you’re told you your glitzy footstool cost £2k and was flown in from Milan, to match the nubile marble goddess looming over your bidet and the shabby chic trouser press, cleverly disguised as a Regency modesty screen, with hand-painted cherubs.

There’s very little that’s idiosyncratic about Liverpool’s new breed of hotel - which, for a city keen to trumpet its creative credentials, is a crying shame. Other cities commission artists to take a room as their canvas, and do something amazing: take a look at Nantes’ Hotel Pommeraye (home of the Giants - the lemon-coloured room, pic), or Copenhagen’s Fox hotel (multicoloured room, right, is one of many - all individually conceived).

What does the riotous and wonderful Fox Hotel say?

It says Copenhagen’s finding inspiration outside of the Champagne and chandelier crowd. The ABBA-owned, and coolly enchanting Rival Hotel in Stockholm (the cool white room, pic r, above), is saying you can be subtle and celebratory too. That theme hotels can be less Alton Towers and more adult playrooms. Take a look at Brighton’s Art Hotel , Helsinki’s Klaus, London’s budget Qbic or Berlin’s slick Casa Camper. Not a silver-sprayed headboard in sight. This is the direction the rest of the world’s grown up cities are moving in. What say we move too?

Marseilles (like Nantes, a post-industrial maritime city) invites artists, graphic designers, and painters from the region to design each room (pic r) afresh, each year: this says so much more about the restless, thrilling new Marseilles than a one size fits all solution of leather Chesterfields and Louis Ghost Chair replicas. It says the city, and the hotel are amazing, distinct, and audacious.

Luxury and swagger is all very well, if that’s your thing - but it shows a lazy lack of vision, a derivative design palette - let’s face it, no matter how many glowing trip advisor reviews you get, your sistine chapel ceiling is, at most, only ever going to be the world’s second best, isn’t it?

Is that what we’re aiming for?

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