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Buying Your Favorite Hotel Furniture
In January, 1994, my house in Los Angeles was destroyed by the massive Northridge earthquake. It had to be bulldozed.
And I had to start…from scratch. That was the bad news. The good news, is that I had an idea of how to make my new house into a hotel suite….home.
I travel more than 400,000 miles a year. That’s not just a lot of travel – that’s a lot of hotels. And as I thought about what I wanted in my new house, my points of reference were the memories of hundreds of hotel rooms around the world.
After all those nights in all those hotels, it quickly dawned on me that what I really wanted in my house was the best of what I had experienced in furniture, equipment and design in all of those hotels.
Slowly, then surely, I began to make phone calls around the world, and much to my pleasant surprise, I discovered that – for a price – everything in every one of the hotels I had visited was for sale. Without realizing it, I had already test-driven my house. And now, it was just a number of phone calls and emails away.
Without realizing it, I had started a trend. I wanted the king size bed from the the Four Seasons in New York (around $2000) , the bathroom window from the Princeville Resort in Kauai, the bathtub from the Peninsula in Hong Kong, a toilet like the one in Tokyo's Park Hyatt, a pool like the Westin Hotel in St. John, and even a sink like the one in the presidential suite at Caesar's Palace. Done.
When I boasted to a well-known female talk show host about my bed, she ordered 20! (She’s got a slightly larger house….) Soon after I got the shower head from the legendary Savoy hotel in London, a store in California started marketing them.
And now, 13 years later, many hotels have become profit centers of design and innovation – for home applications. MORE...
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