Harrods considers luxury hotel on rooftop

by Melanie Nayer on

What’s better than a sale at Harrods and mid-afternoon tea? A sale at Harrods and mid-afternoon tea from your hotel room at the top of Harrods.

The new owners of the iconic London department store are considering plans to open a luxury hotel on the roof, according to the London Evening Standard. The article claims the Qatari owners of the landmark store think a luxury “Harrods Hotel” would be a success with wealthy, foreign visitors. We tend to agree.

The store is located in the trendy Knightsbridge district, also home to the five-star Mandarin Oriental hotel, Jumeirah Carlton Tower Hotel and The Stafford London by Kempinski.

Could this be a trend? Might other department stores start planning hotels in their presence? In Massachusetts, the Natick Collection, which houses everything from Nordstrom’s to Levi’s, also has condos and business apartments on the top floors of the mall. Strategic planning? Absolutely!

We want to know: Would you stay at a hotel located on top of a department store, or would the temptation be too much?

[via USA Today]

Round-the-world: Capricorn Route trip top ten

by Alex Robertson Textor on

Later this week I’ll reflect on the ups and downs of our round-the-world trip. I’ll look at what we might have done differently as well as those elements that turned out to be particularly well conceived. In the meantime, here’s a playful top ten list of some of the best things we encountered along the way: best beach; best ice cream; best tourist trap; best breakfast; best market stall; best new subway line; best hotel arrival punch; best rough neighborhood; best flight; and best place to sharpen cupcake decoration skills.

1. Best beach: Châteaubriand Bay Beach, Lifou. The Loyalty Island of Lifou in New Caledonia certainly several incredible beaches. Châteaubriand Bay Beach is the most magnificent of these. The sand is delicate and white, the water is a mesmerizing hue, and there’s plenty of shade for those who burn easily. Locals share the beach with tourists, though in the very pleasant off-season there are few of either around.

2. Best ice cream: violet ice cream at Cutler & Co in Melbourne. The extraordinary tasting menu served at Cutler & Co was devoid of missteps. The parting shot of violet ice cream left a bold final impression. It was also the tastiest serving of ice cream of the trip.

3. Best (that is, worst) tourist trap: Île aux Cerfs, Mauritius. Everyone raves about Île aux Cerfs, an island off the east coast of Mauritius. Visitors pay 1000 rupees ($34) upfront at a tour agency in the coastal town of Trou d’Eau Douce for access to the island plus a barbecue lunch. A boat picks up tourists and deposits them at a jetty on the island, then later ferries them over to another island for a barbecue lunch. The island is packed with tourists and touts selling boat rides and parasailing adventures. Prior to development, this island was no doubt terribly beautiful–and, it must be said, it has no landscape-scarring developments even now–but it’s quite crowded for a destination where it is pretty easy to avoid masses of tourists.

4. Best breakfast: Forbes & Burton, Sydney. A potato cake under poached eggs with smoked salmon and onion jam (AUD$18) was the best breakfast of the trip, hearty and refined at once. Runner-up in the great breakfast stakes: several items on the menu at Il Fornaio in Melbourne’s St. Kilda neighborhood.

5. Best market stall: Tisanes N. Mootoosamy, Stall 244, Central Market, Port Louis. The owner’s pitch is hilarious: “There’s one herb we sell here that you can’t use until you leave Mauritius. This is the anti-stress herb, because there’s no stress on Mauritius.” The range of ailments addressed by the herbs on offer here, meant to be imbibed as tea, is broad. It includes menopause, insomnia, cellulite, and anemia.

6. Best new subway line: London Overground East London line. Opened for service in May, 2010, this new line provides a new more or less vertical south-to-north link from West Croydon to Dalston Junction. Some stations are pristine and modern and the trains are gleamingly new.

7. Best arrival punch: Oasis De Kiamu, Lifou. To be fair, this was our only welcome punch, but no matter. It’s awfully nice to be welcomed to a hotel in the tropics with a fruity drink, especially one that turns out to foreshadow well the flavorful aperitifs to come.

8. Best supposedly rough-and-tumble neighborhood: Footscray, Melbourne. I loved this neighborhood of cheap Vietnamese restaurants, a market, an excellent community arts center, and countless specialty shops, many oriented to Melbourne’s various ethnic communities. If you find yourself in Melbourne in desperate need of a grocery that sells both Fijian and Sri Lankan products, Footscray would be a safe bet.

9. Best flight: Qantas Business class Los Angeles-Sydney on the Airbus A380. This is, quite simply, one of the best business-class long-haul routes around. The seats recline completely, the food is quite nice, and there is plenty of privacy. Even the bathroom lighting is gentle. Not cheap, though completely worthwhile.

10. Best place to take a lesson in cupcake decoration: Amandine, London. One of many exciting retail venues in Victoria Park Village, Amandine is a beautiful little café that prioritizes delicious homemade cakes. It also offers fresh produce, good coffee, and free wi-fi. Inside, Amandine is bright and cheerful, like a stylish country cottage gone Boho. There’s also a back garden.

Check out other posts in the Capricorn Route series here.

Round-the-world: Victoria Park Village, London’s most perfect retail cluster

by Alex Robertson Textor on

London is the final stop on our round-the-world trip. This stop is different than the seven that preceded it; from the moment the plane lands, we are no longer in vacation mode. The point of our visit is to do research in preparation for a move to London in December.

First and foremost, our objective is to figure out what sort of living situation we can afford; after that, our goal is to assess neighborhoods based on the quality of local grocery stores, restaurants, and cafes as well as a dry cleaner, good transportation links, and the other sorts of intangible atmospheric factors that make a neighborhood appealing.

In our housing search, we focus on London’s East. The areas that appeal to us the most are in three East London boroughs: Hackney (specifically London Fields, the north side of Victoria Park, Shoreditch, and Dalston), Tower Hamlets (Bethnal Green), and Islington (Clerkenwell and around).

Along the way, we stumble across Victoria Park Village, a neighborhood that checks all our boxes and also perfectly embodies an outsider’s fantasy of an ideal London neighborhood. Victoria Park Village is at the intersection of Victoria Road and Lauriston Road, in the borough of Hackney, just north of Victoria Park.

Emerging from the park along Lauriston Road, a visitor immediately notices plenty of trees, strong foot traffic, many retail establishments, and the slender spire of a small church on the horizon. Were this intersection in Notting Hill, one could imagine a heavy tourist presence. Because this neighborhood is a fair hike from higher-volume tourist areas, it’s firmly off most tourist itineraries.

Carrot cake from Amandine.

The neighborhood has two great cafés, Loafing (below) and Amandine (above); Bill Hall, a greengrocer/fruiterer; a fishmonger; one of four branches of The Ginger Pig butcher shop; several barbershops; a wine store with frequent tastings called Bottle Apostle; a handful of clothing stores; several estate agents; Haus, a fancy home furnishings store, a local bookstore (Victoria Park Books); and a smattering of restaurants. For dining, there’s Su Sazzagoni, a Sardinian trattoria and delicatessen; a takeaway restaurant called Hope Caribbean Cuisine; and Fish House, which is, at least somewhat expectedly, a seafood restaurant.


Loafing, on a late weekend morning.

One appeal of London for many visitors is the promise of a quaint neighborhood, a place where the vague, romantic notion of the English market village merges with London’s bustling energy. The thing is, many parts of London’s West that might once have fulfilled such fantasies have become very expensive, mobbed with tourists and clogged with international high-end boutiques. Nothing against Aesop and agnès b. outlets, but they belong in a shopping district, not a neighborhood retail landscape. Victoria Park Village, with its inarguable cuteness and many local, small-scale specialty shops, delivers the traditional neighborhood goods.

Next week, I’ll finish up the Capricorn Route series with some reflections on five weeks on the road as well as a trip top ten list.

You can check out other posts in the Capricorn Route series here.

Buddha and Picasso at the British Museum

by Sean McLachlan on

The Fall season has started at London’s British Museum with two excellent free exhibitions.

Images and sacred texts: Buddhism across Asia starts today. It covers Buddhist art and sacred literature from Sri Lanka to Japan and explains the core beliefs of what can be a difficult religion to understand. The artifacts are from the museum’s permanent collection–one of the biggest in the world–and include many items that have never been displayed before.

Picasso to Julie Mehretu: modern drawings from the British Museum collection started on October 7 and examines the interchange between artists over the past hundred years. It begins with Picasso, one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, and ends with Julie Mehretu, an Ethiopian artist who is one of today’s most popular contemporary artists.

The British Museum is one of many free museums in London, including the Tate Modern, Tate Britain, National Gallery, and National Portrait Gallery. This helps cut the cost of a trip to what is otherwise a very expensive destination. The British Museum is deservedly high on every visitor’s list because of its giant collection of artifacts from every ancient culture, from Egyptian mummies to Viking swords. The ongoing series of free exhibits gives repeat visitors a chance to see something new with every trip.

Picasso to Julie Mehretu: modern drawings from the British Museum collection will run until 25 April 2011. Images and sacred texts: Buddhism across Asia runs until 3 April 2011.

Concorde supersonic jet to find new home in London

by Meg Nesterov on

Seven years after the final Concorde flight, one of the 11 remaining supersonic passenger jets may find a new home on London‘s South Bank, next to the London Eye. RHWL Architects, whose past projects include the British Airways headquarters and the Four Seasons Canary Wharf, are rumored to have planned a $35 million dollar double-decker display with a river boat landing underneath the plane.

The current Alpha Bravo aircraft is housed at Heathrow Airport by British Airways and not viewable by the public. Travelers can currently see a jet at the Concorde Experience in Barbados, the only Caribbean destination on the former supersonic route, as well as at these museums and airports. Earlier this year, a team of engineers began an examination of a French plane in hopes of bringing the Concorde back to the skies.

Travelers – would you pay to see the Concorde? Or better yet, fly the Concorde?

[Photo credit: Flickr user Beechwood Photography]