It’s So Dreary Where You Are. Run Away to These Places Immediately!
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“My life was but a tangled web until the Wag spun me in a whole new direction.”—Louise Bourgeois
The Wag-in-Chief tells us that when he was a grubby little wiggle, he was given The World of Venice, by Wag Emerita Jan Morris. What a gift that book proved to be — whisking him off to that White Swan of Cities, as fantastical as any dream! This, and The Hobbit, sparked a love of going there and back again. You needn’t spend gobs of money to travel, especially in these precarious times. But do yourself a favor and run off somewhere interesting, using your boundless imagination. The armchair is the best conveyance ever invented for going to faraway places, and you don’t have to pack a thing. Allow us to introduce you to a few of our favorite destinations. Some have been shuttered during the pandemic, but all will give you something to dream about. Better days are coming. Meantime, sit back and have a lovely trip. —Aphra Behn
Hotel Danieli Venezia
Venice is a town of overpriced hotels and low-rent tourism, but it is impossible not to love. Come when it is gray and bitingly cold, come when it floods, come when it is stifling and the mosquitos are biting, and only the stoniest heart can resist it. Whenever you visit, be a practical traveler and go on somebody else’s dime. Like Dickens, Goethe, P. Guggenheim and 007, the Waggish are drawn to the former Palazzo Dandolo, built in the 14th century, overlooking St. Mark’s Basin. The Danieli has been a hotel since the 1820s, and has grown to swallow the neighboring Casa Nuova. Please put North American square footage out of your head (unless you wish to take out a second mortgage for the Doge Suite) and embrace the charm of the narrow, low, and sloping. The best spot for a bite to eat is the rooftop restaurant, where you can sip a Negroni, oblivious to the sweaty hordes below, as the sun dips low over the lagoon.
Riva degli Schiavoni, 4196, 30122 Venezia VE, Italy
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The Biltmore Santa Barbara
If you were starring in an old movie, you might board a train at Union Station in Los Angeles, several steamer trunks in tow, and wend up the coast to the Biltmore, which takes up 22 acres of the California Riviera, steps from one of the greatest beaches in the world. Actually you could do all of these things without being in an old movie, but please don’t do it lugging steamer trunks, because it would be far more trouble than it’s worth. The point is, this place hasn’t lost a step since it went up in 1927 (if it did, the steps were relocated during painstaking renovations). The Biltmore was designed by architect Reginald Johnson and landscape architect Ralph Stephens, with interior gussying from theatrical designer William Stringer. You are not on a soundstage, but you might as well be. There really isn’t a bad room (or bungalow), and there’s all that ocean. The Coral Casino Beach and Cabana Club, a streamline moderne retreat built in 1937, has an Olympic-size swimming pool suitable for Esther Williams.
1260 Channel Dr, Santa Barbara, CA 93108
The Urban Cowboy Lodge
If Wag has one rule of thumb about getting away from New York City, it is Always Point Yourself North. The scenery is better, and within a short while, you will arrive in some bucolic corner that will make you forget all about the blackened gum stains on the sidewalks of 8th Avenue. If you wish to put civilization in the rear view, there is no better place than the Urban Cowboy Lodge. We aren’t crazy about the name, which makes us think of mechanical bulls, but we highly recommend the retreat, which is surrounded by the Big Indian Wilderness of Catskill Park. You can hike through the thickly wooded hills, splash in Esopus Creek, and reread My Side of the Mountain, only the best book ever written about the Catskills, by a roaring fire. One thing you will not be able to do is fiddle with your mobile phone, because it’s not going to be of much use way up here. You’ll survive.
37 Alpine Road, Big Indian, NY, 12410
The Greenbrier
The are hotels, and then there is the Greenbrier, which is more of a psychotropic hallucination. People have been coming to this corner of the Allegheny Mountains to bathe in the local sulphur springs for centuries, but the contemporary spa dates to 1910, when the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad bought the property and constructed the 250-room hotel that makes up the central wing of a now even more enormous neoclassical complex. In the late 1940s, interior designer Dorothy Draper did over the place in outrageous technicolor, decades before Instagram was a glimmer in anybody’s eye. If you are looking for something spare from Dwell magazine, you won’t find it, but you will have fun matching wall colors to Baskin Robbins ice cream flavors. The sprawling sanitarium is an American Last Year at Marienbad, offering every diversion under the sun (the indoor pool is a trip). Yes, 26 presidents have stayed at the hotel, and yes, there is a massive underground bunker constructed during the Eisenhower years to house the government in the event of a nuclear war, but things are more whimsical than that. It’s the elaborate set of a Wes Anderson movie yet to be made.
101 W Main St, White Sulphur Springs, WV 24986
Blakes Hotel London
Before people stopped going places, there were fussy boutique hotels, and before that, there was Blakes, which was born in the mohawks-and-safety-pins year of 1978. Blakes isn’t fussy, it is sleek. A long time ago, we were taken to a grown-up dinner in its restaurant, and maybe Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall were there, too. It was that sort of den. Blakes was designed by Wag Suprema Anoushka Hempel, who calls herself a savant of the visual, which is a highfalutin way of saying she has an eye for detail. Everything is dark and shimmery, like a lacquered box for keeping opium in. (Oh, for heaven’s sake, we are not endorsing opium, which is dreadful, we are simply painting a picture!) London is crammed with all sorts of hotels — haunted old piles, insufferable private clubs, chilly B&B’s where tepid water leaks out of rubber hoses—but there is only one Blakes. It transcends hipster nonsense and stays cool. It’s not taking bookings now because the world has obviously gone to hell in a handbasket, but one fine day, those clouds will part.
33 Roland Gardens, South Kensington, London SW7 3PF, United Kingdom
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“We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But the Wag makes for delightful filler.”—Dag Hammarskjöld
July 31, 2024
