A hotel room should make you feel as at ease and comfortable as your own home, but on its very best day (and maybe with a few added extras). The thing that really makes it relaxing is the detail – any room can be painted in a nice colour and a comfortable bed shipped in, but: are there USB and USBC ports next to the bed? Can you turn off the main lights and bedside lights from a switch next to the bed? Is it sound-proofed? (might sound dodgy, but nothing worse than hearing a stranger snore all night), is there a hook near the shower/bath so you don't drip everywhere after washing? We’ve canvassed the House & Garden team to get a view on what makes a really good hotel room, and the results are in.
Bedrooms
First things first, a hotel room should include the sort of impractical details that you probably wouldn’t do in your own house. Think things like four poster beds, or showers that are super hard to clean and absolutely giant – it just makes things feel much more luxurious. A truly enormous bed, the kind that means two people could fully spread out on their side and not even come close to touching, is what we like and a dressing table is always welcome too, with a convenient place to plug the hairdryer in – we’ve all had way too many experiences of contorting our bodies to look in a mirror when the hairdryer is plugged in halfway across the room.
As for said giant bed, we’d like to start a formal petition for all hotels to finally stop tucking the bedding tightly into the mattress! No one does that at home and it’s always a pain having to untuck the whole thing and then have a tangle of sheets that make no sense. Is there anyone who likes it? Really top quality pillows, linen, and mattress go without saying as without those, we’d all rather just sleep in our own bed – and a pillow menu is an added bonus as one man’s soft feathery thin heaven is another person’s hell. Perhaps an option to pre-submit your pillow preferences, but that is being quite demanding.
The last big thing that makes a really good hotel room is the ability to properly control the heating. They are often unbearably hot on first entering and even if you know how to work a fairly simple control panel, never seem to actually adjust to the desired temperature when you set it. Windows you can open and avoid the air con entirely are preferable, though of course safety and noise concerns (for hotels in big cities) have meant this isn’t often the case. However a hotel room with both options is the best case scenario and when the air conditioning is on, it had best be so quiet that you cannot hear even the faintest hum (as some of us are quite sensitive to mechanical humming while trying to sleep and air conditioning is one of the worst culprits).
Bathrooms
Baths are for hotel bathrooms and many a House & Garden staff member has a strong dislike for baths in bedrooms. Said bath should be as deep and luxurious as they can (though not so long that even a fairly tall person can’t lie down in it without sinking under thanks to the sheer amount of legroom). Showers and baths should come as standard, but never one over the other, especially in bathrooms with ample space for a standalone shower and a bath. The shower needs to have tip top water pressure – it can never be worse than what you have at home and that is why pumps were invented.
Other things that make it feel like a room has been well designed include a generous surface in the bathroom for wash bags and toiletries, either a proper wide vanity or some kind of side table – you don’t want to have to balance all your stuff behind the taps. On that note, a bath with a wide surround where you can put toiletries, a book, a glass of wine and so on is a must – freestanding baths look romantic but they’re so impractical with nowhere for your bathing requirements.
Lastly, and perhaps most obviously, plenty of towels and flannels should go without saying.
Technology
This is a big category and where hotels get the technology side of a room wrong can be quite their downfall. Easily accessible charging points by the bed (and preferably elsewhere) are an absolute must as there’s nothing that gets people more annoyed in a hotel room than scrabbling around on the floor behind the bedside table trying to get a charger in. As one staff member puts it, “plugs above the bedside table so you don’t need a wire the length of the Corinth canal to charge your phone”.
The lighting element gets a lot of flack, from being too confusing to simply not good enough. On the latter, we want lights that actually illuminate the room so you can find what you’re looking for, rather than being all too poor ‘moody’ lighting at best. As for the confusion point, this relates to lighting systems that require a manual to work and mean you have to get out of bed to turn off a lamp across the room or you keep turning all the lights on and off with various tiny bedside switches because there’s just that one which simply won’t go. Ideally, if there is a big master system, there needs to be a clear ‘master’ switch that turns off everything at once, regardless of which other buttons you may have already pressed. Some would prefer lighting systems like at home, with overhead lights on wall switches and individual bedside lamps that can be controlled by their own switch – much simpler.
The same goes for curtains and blinds; if the hotel insists on having these controlled by switches so that you can wake up and greet the day without having to get out of bed (which is a nice touch), there should also be the option for the more analogue amongst us to be able to get out of bed, throw the curtains and blinds open by hand and get back in again. The best of both worlds.
If you have a TV in your hotel room (which most do and ought to), it has to have more channels than just news or shopping channels. After a long day tramping around a new city, who hasn’t wanted to zone out for an hour before getting ready for dinner, only to find the only option is CNN or Al-Jazeera... serious loss of hotel cred. And if you can’t muster up some decent channels, well all TVs should come with either smart capabilities or casting abilities so you can find something good to stream.
Lastly, and for some of us, most importantly, there should be as few irritating lights as possible that glow once all the lights are off eg TV standby lights, coffee machine, smoke alarm etc. They are simply the worst and some staff members have gone to extreme measures (using dinosaur stickers from their toddler’s favourite sticker book, for example) to black these out. One too bright light and no one is getting any sleep.
Amenities
A proper coffee-making device like a French press or drip machine goes a long way (not a weak Nespresso machine which seems to be the trend right now). Some of our favourite hotel experiences include waking up early with a freshly brewed cup of really, really good coffee and watching the sun come up. One such example was at Hotel Chocolat's Rabot Hotel in St Lucia; the treehouse-like lodges face the beautiful Piton mountains and each lodge comes with freshly ground local coffee and a cafetière. Bonus points for the delightful handmade mugs. Where there is a Nespresso machine as standard, lots of coffee pods should be the standard – at least five or six, ideally as many as possible in the room generally. It's not like they go off… For the tea drinkers amongst us, hot water facilities that don’t come through said Nespresso machine are needed and ideally a teapot and some proper tea. If it’s all teabags, that’s fine but we need a good selection and a fair few of each – two English breakfast teabags is not enough.
This segues into our milk demands – the fridge should be stocked with real milk, not horrible UHT packets. Because really is there anything nicer than opening the fridge to find a small glass bottle of milk ready for the morning? Well yes, finding a bottle of fresh juice in there that is complimentary, alongside some homemade biscuits to accompany your pre-breakfast refreshment. Free snacks should come as standard in four and five-star hotels where you’re already paying a high room rate. We’re not talking about a fully stocked mini-bar but soft drinks, some chocolate, sweets, savoury snacks and homemade biscuits are a lovely touch to know you can have as you fancy without paying over and above when you’re already splashing out. The Newt, unsurprisingly, do it very well where you essentially get a hamper so good you needn't really leave the room, and The Pilgrm has communal pantries you can raid for an afternoon pick-me-up.
Besides things that the hotel can't really control – a brilliant window view being the most obvious, as one of the best hotel rooms one team member ever stayed let him wake up to a framed view of the Acropolis every morning – a good room should have an ironing board that doesn’t collapse under its own weight and, ideally, an iron, but it’s fine if that has to come from reception. A radio or speaker is always a huge win, though these are often rare.
