Mixing Arts and Hotels

Check out this cool article from Hotelchatter.com featuring our very own
Fairmont, Pacific Rim

Exhibit A: Vancouver Art Gallery’s Grand Hotel Exhibit
By: Janice Tober for HotelChatter

If you consider yourself a true hotel nerd, pack your bags: You’re going to Vancouver! The Vancouver Art Gallery has an installation so perfect it ain’t even funny. It’s called Grand Hotel: Redesigning Modern Life (on until September 15) and it’s broken out into four themes: Travel, Social, Cultural and Design (see our full-blown review of the exhibit on sister site, Jaunted).

Not to get too arty on you, but here’s our take on how these themes play out in real life using the fine Fairmont Pacific Rim as our specimen.

Travel: Yes, travel can be getting from Point A to Point B but the underlying driver for most is adventure and escape.

Everything about the Fairmont Pacific Rim says “escape,” particularly the amazing Willow Stream Spa with its outdoor sun deck, where you can hang out with your pampered peeps around heating lamps and fireplaces, or in the whirlpools with flat-screen TVs above you to catch your favorite show.

Social: Hotels are social hubs full of interpersonal machinations.

We told you about the Fairmont Pacific Rim’s hot-spot Lobby Lounge earlier this week, but then there’s their Oru Restaurant or their hopping giovane café: coffee bar by day (reputed to have the best in the city) and wine bar by night. To say these spots are popular with locals and guests would be the understatement of the day. Social hubs? Absolutely!

Stay with us -- two more themes to go!

Design: One of our favorite topics when it comes to hotels, design is one of the ways hotels keep upping their game so that the cool kids will stay there. In fact, the whole hotel experience is curated: service, food, rooms, all designed to say something to you.

You see good design all over the Fairmont Pacific Rim, whether through tiny (but expensive!) details like having the marble walls in the lobby form a strangely pleasing line of Vs or through large statements like the Owner's Suite (locally known as “the cube”) which hangs outside of the hotel in all of its maxed out chicness.

Culture: Hotels leave an imprint on the place they’re located as do the people who stay there. Good hotels –- the ones we geeks really like -– add to the place they call home.

At the Fairmont Pacific Rim, the building itself is a work of art with its poem found on the outside of the building when you look up or through its in-house art collection. Similarly, guests leave an imprint, whether it’s the recent stay by Tom Cruise (just a rumor you understand -– wink, wink) or other celebs or royals that the hotel is too discreet to name.

The hotel has a Designed to Perfection package that includes VIP passes to the Vacouver Art Gallery, overnight accommodation, a self-guided art and design tour of the hotel, the hotel's book Room for Passion, a guided architecture tour of Vancouver by the Architecture Institute of BC, and a picnic lunch from giovane café -- all starting at $549 CAD ($532).