My wife and I didn't want to leave our bed at the Hotel Delamar in Greenwich, CT. Sure, we were having a romantic weekend, but more than just love was preventing us from getting up -- the quilt and pillows made us feel like we were floating on clouds.
A good hotel room is full of delicious stuff -- pillows a lot more lush than my $19 Bed Bath & Beyond on-sale specials and bath products that make my $2.29 Rite Aid shampoo at home look like, well, $2.29 Rite Aid shampoo. Sure, it also helps that people are waiting on you hand and foot at a four-star hotel, but plush furnishings go a long way towards creating a luxury experience.
Want to make your home feel a little more like a top-of-the-line hotel? Order in room service from your nearest takeout place, call up the local maid service and buy bed and bath goodies from your favorite luxury lodging.
The first hotel bed to start appearing in homes en masse was Westin's Heavenly Bed, introduced by the Starwood chain five years ago. Custom-developed by Westin, the Heavenly Bed became a bit of a cult item. "The first week, 32 guests called to ask how they could take the beds home with them," says Westin vice president Sue Brush.
As you can't snatch a bed the way you can pack away a hotel bathrobe, Westin set up a shop and delivery service, available online at www.westin-hotelsathome.com. A full Heavenly ensemble starts at $2,565, but you can get just the mattress and box spring for $1,100. With prices like that, it's no wonder most customers go for the $65-75 pillows instead; Brush says pillows are Westin's most popular items.
Following up on the Westin experience, Starwood also sells their new Sheraton Sweet Sleeper bed through a toll-free hotline (tel. 888/3-SHERATON) for a similar price: a queen-sized mattress and box spring run $1,100, while sheets, pillows and blankets range from $30 to $310.
Starwood's trendier W chain, meanwhile, goes even further -- you can outfit your entire house to a T (or a W), down to the leaf-shaped coasters used in hotel bars and wacky bathroom scales with footprints melted into them. W's online store (www.whotels-hotelsathome.com) lets you search by product category or by individual hotel, so you can pick up the specific throw pillows you saw in your room.
But you don't have to be a mega-chain to bring your bedding to the masses. I found my dreamy Delamar pillows at the hotel's website (www.hotelsathome.com/ecpublic/060/bed.htm) for $75 each, a reasonable price for a quality down pillow. The $25 bath towels also seem a decent deal, though the $22 bottle of shampoo may be going a little far. The $250 down duvet insert is also utterly cozy.
The Breakers in Palm Beach, FL, which belongs to the Small Luxury Hotels association along with the Delamar, sells its private-label bath products and bathrobes at its online store (www.thebreakers.com/shop_the_breakers/shop_online). You can also pick up the Breakers beach umbrella -- though bringing home Palm Beach itself to plant the umbrella in might be a bit difficult.
If bedding doesn't excite you, the Hotel Valencia Riverwalk in San Antonio, TX and the Rusty Parrot Lodge in Jackson Hole, WY, two more Small Luxury Hotels, go a bit farther afield with their retail items -- you can pick up a faux mink throw for your bed at the Valencia, and an antler-shaped bathroom hook at the Rusty Parrot. Neither sell their goods online.
The Delamar and other boutique hotels get some of their bedding from Down Lite/HotelDownShop.com (www.store.yahoo.com/hoteldownshop/index.html) -- take a look at the tag on a pillow if you have a particularly dreamy time at a small hotel. Down Lite's own shop sells pillows, blankets, and comforters, but not beds themselves. Also, watch out: just because a great hotel pillow may be from these guys doesn't mean all your hotel bedding came from them. The Delamar, for example, gets their duvet inserts from somewhere else.
Hotels overseas are less likely to sell their goods online, but you can pick up signature items in hotel shops at luxury joints like the Hotel de Crillon in Paris and the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong. While researching Frommer's online guide to Iceland in May, I noticed that nation's hippest hotel, the 101 Hotel (www.101hotel.is) sells nearly everything in the rooms -- compelling, because their rooms are stocked with minor modern masterpieces of Icelandic design and culture. The prices are sky-high, though, so I'd probably make off with the gorgeous $15 bottle opener and buy the Björk DVD in the Virgin Megastore at home.
