Travel Blog - Mr & Mrs Smith Boutique & Luxury Hotels

Just came across this wondrous collection of hotel door hangers posted by graphic designer Michael Lebowitz on his Big Spaceship blog and simply had to share.

Not only do they form a truly beautiful retro graphic-design time capsule, they gave me a massive hit of nostalgia for ‘the old days’ of hotel travel (note, I didn’t say ‘good’ old days): I can almost smell the orange polyester-trimmed wool blankets, recall the cream and brown plastic packaging of the mini toiletries, and the job-lot watercolours of elephants, mediaeval castles or tropical hibiscus plants. Not like today’s stylish luxury boutique hotels, with their pillow menus, Starck-spangled bathrooms and LaChapelle-adorned walls.

I only wish I could share with you my own collection of hotel ephemera, which ranged from bar coasters and luggage tags to retro hotel cocktail stirrers (aka swizzle sticks). This was also diversified into the little plastic cocktail sticks that held the maraschino cherry in place atop your Piña Colada (usually in the form of a miniature cutlass). The collection had to be whittled down (ie, binned) after a recent move into a teeny tiny flat. Several of my favourite cocktail stirrers came from the Falcon Lounge cocktail bar at the Malta Hilton – including a gold-coloured plastic 1970s number, topped with a spreadeagled bird of prey clutching a golden egg.

Another form of vintage ephemera sadly now consigned to the rubbish bin of time (thanks to the smoking ban) is the hotel-brand matchbox or matchbook – definitely a sign of the cigar-friendly-Seventies times, since free matches are now as rare as hen’s teeth. Let us know if you collect any travel-related oddities: naff souvenirs, perhaps. Pictures welcome…

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 11th, 2008 at 9:34 am and is filed under Design, Uncategorized. You can follow any comments on this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.