On a stopover en route to New York I once stayed in an airport hotel in Birmingham. A year later I ended up booking into the same chain in Paris, only to discover I needn't have bothered travelling the extra miles - the room in each hotel was exactly the same, right down to the car-upholstery style sofa and the paper frill on the tooth glass. I almost checked under the bed to see if the alarm clock I had lost in Birmingham might just have shimmied over to France as well.
This used to be what was meant by an international hotel - a capsule you could walk into anywhere in the world safe in the knowledge that you would have absolutely no sense of being in a foreign country. International hotels traded in the generic, the bland and the inoffensive, and they are still enduringly popular.
Yet ever since hotelier and former Studio 54 owner Ian Schrager first opened the doors to the Morgans hotel in New York in 1984, there has been a new variety of international hotel on offer. In these rather quaintly-titled "boutique hotels" - the Hempel and the Metropolitan in London, the Mercer in New York, the Delano in Miami - design rather than familiarity is the new god. Their international flavour stems from the fact they could be placed anywhere in the world and still be uniquely themselves.
Traditionally, Ireland has been rather short on designer hotels. The Clarence Hotel would qualify in the design stakes yet keeps its boot firmly in the Irish hotel camp because, well, the Clarence has always been around for tea and stout. The Fitzwilliam Hotel on St Stephen's Green would certainly qualify as a boutique hotel - Terence Conran-designed, it is small and looks as though it could quite easily feature in the ubertrendy design mag, Wallpaper. The newest kid on the block is the Morrison Hotel, which opened its doors to the public in June and will be fully completed this week. Situated on Dublin's Ormond Quay, the Morrison looks as though it's in a show-down with the Clarence Hotel just across the Liffey. Yet while it's a newcomer to Dublin, the people behind the new hotel have well-established credentials.
Its owner is Hugh O'Regan, the young entrepreneur behind the Thomas Read Group, who own a number of city centre bars including Thomas Read's, the Bailey and Searsons. This is his first venture into the hotel business. The design consultant was fashion designer John Rocha while the architect was Hugh Wallace and his team from Douglas Wallace. Its pedigree is undoubtedly impeccable, and luckily the end result lives up to the hype.
There is a lot of room for hyperbole in the Morrison, because there's just so much darn space. The ceilings are high, the lobby is long, the brown suede couches are vast, and the massive carved wooden head in the supper club downstairs would make the beefiest of clubbers feel they were in Lilliput. One whole wall of the main restaurant, Halo, is covered in white muslin. Two storeys of white muslin. Already the bar has become the hip new place to drink, but despite the quantities of bright young things draped over the cream leather bar stools, there is still a feeling of calm.
Undoubtedly this has much to do with the Oriental feel that dominates the design of the hotel. Nothing so hackneyed as black lacquer or red brocade, there is nonetheless a paredback, dark-wood-and-white-walls ethos to the place that is unmistakably eastern. "The Oriental feeling is important in the design of hotels all over the world" points out designer John Rocha, who is Hong Kong-born but an Irish resident for many years. "Which is why some of the best hotels in the world are in Asia - places like Bali and Singapore. That's why Hugh chose me for the hotel. But it's not an Oriental hotel, it's an Irish hotel and that is what makes it work."
Rocha is right - there are many distinctively Irish elements to the hotel, but if you are looking for wastelands of Connemara marble or heathery tweeds you'll be a long time searching. One of the first things that Rocha did was to design the long thin strip of grey and cream carpet that runs from the reception area right through the atrium to the bar. Manufactured in Ireland, the design looks abstract, is inspired by the Liffey outside the door and is now used as the logo for the hotel. Other major features of the hotel's design are also 100 per cent Irish in origin, even if there is nothing of the shamrock about them. Rocha had collected the work of artist Clea van der Grijn, since her NCAD graduation show in 1991. One Friday in June 1998 he contacted her and asked her to come up with some designs he could show to O'Regan. By the following Monday she had a commission to complete by November: to produce several large panels which now hang in the reception and the supper club downstairs - and 100 pieces measuring four foot by one foot that now hang in each bedroom. "I was hugely excited - I hadn't had a penny for two years. I gave up my admin job with the Temple Bar Galleries and worked without stop until November." She enthuses about her art materials shopping sprees in New York and London and about having such a wealth of materials to hand for the first time. She would make the bedroom pieces in batches of 10, first layering handmade papers from Japan or India, then adding translucent layers and finally finishing off with gold leaf on the reds. The patterns of lines in each piece come from the Ogham stone alphabet; "I joked with Hugh that each one actually says something." The other main artwork in the hotel is by sculptor Eoin Byrne, the man behind the huge carved head - which splits open to reveal an endless reflection of mirrors. "I wanted something like the original wooden sculptures I had seen in Africa," says Rocha. "So Hugh says `I know this guy that can make this stuff'. Eoin did all the lovely handmade work with Irish woods you see around. I was surrounded by a team for the project."
Rocha's own design touches are also very evident in the hotel. There are the trademark dyed velvet cushions and throws, using Mel Bradley-designed fabrics, in both the lobby and in each bedroom. "I spend three or four months of every year travelling, and I wanted to create the kind of hotel I want to stay in myself," says Rocha. "It had to be full of beautiful things, beautiful to touch and to feel." If Rocha is the man behind the clothes the Morrison is wearing, then architect Hugh Wallace is responsible for its bone structure. An old friend of O'Regan's, he was first approached three years ago and asked to look into what kind of planning permission they could get for the site, which originally housed the old Ormond Print Works. To Wallace, the site is one of the most important features of the new hotel.
"The location is hugely important, particularly as the new bridge over the Liffey will start right outside the front door. I think what we're seeing is a huge change in pedestrian patterns - Jervis Street which runs down beside the hotel is going to become a main pedestrian thoroughfare."
He and his team, which included Gerry Hand and Grainne Weber, were given a free rein with the physical space, which they created from scratch having knocked down the old print works. "The physical architecture and the volumes of space are hugely important in setting the tone. As you enter the reception, there's this huge high ceiling and from there you can see into the two-storey high restaurant. If you enter from the quays, there's a natural flow into the lobby or down to the club downstairs."
Both he and Rocha emphasise the two different functions of the hotel, as somewhere for Irish people to mingle and somewhere for residents to relax. To this end there is a private residents' bar, complete with library and roof garden situated on top of the restaurant, as well as the main bar, the fusion restaurant, Halo on ground floor, and Lobo, the latenight Asian supper club downstairs. Then of course there's the oh-so-private private bar within Lobo, as befits a hotel that has already played host to REM, who held a party there, Robbie Williams, who ate there, and Kylie Minogue, who was quite coincidentally the first guest at the hotel.
Of course there are weak points in the design of the hotel. The bedrooms, for example, although replete with linen curtains, glassware by Rocha for Waterford Crystal and subtly curving walls, are really rather small. But sitting in the bar, one can get that sense of anonymous excitement that you only find in international hotel bars. Combined with Rocha's sensuous throws, the clean lines of Douglas Wallace, the massive expanses of van der Grijn's paintings, the antiques sourced in Francis Street and the almost grotesque curves of Byrne's dark wood sculptures, you've got a kind of timeless hotel that should carry us into the next century.