Which grand hotel closure will break your heart?

[quote]My cherished Hôtel le Richemond in Geneva has bit the dust.

Due to Corona? I've stayed there. Why do you cherish it?

Breaker's Palm Beach.

More or less due to Corona. Le Richemond was one of my first extended takes on luxury hotels in my youth, along with Hôtel Ritz Paris. Both were a bit frayed but very elegant, this before the 90s saw everything snapped up by gulf money and redone for hundreds of millions or more, in very high but less personal international luxury. I always have had cocktails on the terrace at Le Richemond, its boring old Swiss money personified, with the Art Deco flour de lys and red geraniums, and I became friends with the owner, a very old Geneva hospitality family, and an eldergay gentleman with an enormous cock, and a stable of young lovers, which he asked me to join though I refused. He's long gone, the hotel sold out of the family and through a number of holding companies.

The grand hotels of Switzerland are in a class of their own... they are so special. I was lucky to summer in Switzerland many summers in the late 80's as a teen. Mostly in and around Geneva and the surrounding lake towns... Just amazing, old world, elegant and yet very genuine and real. I haven't been back but I am dying to go again.

Le Richemond is small raclette potatoes compared to giants like the Breakers or Hotel Ritz. But Florida is open for business, is it not? The super rich annual visitors have fled Geneva and won't be back soon.

Howard Johnson's Motor Lodge, Westbury, Long Island

Well, many are on life support. Beau Rivage Lausanne, Montreux Palace, the Lucerne palaces.

The motel eight on route six. So many memories. (Or maybe it's the motel six on route 8--not sure)

I have fond memories of motels, too! High and low, here.

Becks Motor Lodge Market St. SF

No, actually, as garish as it is, The Fairmont in San Francisco. Love that hotel.

The Bellagio , of course .

Grandhotel "Poop" in Karslbad (birthplace of DL icon Princess Michael of Kent!) has also been shut down until further notice. It's depressing to think that its glittering salons and halls are all empty as we speak.

A charming small place of abandon on Toulouse , French Quarter , New Orleans .

The Savoy, London. Grand tradition, wholly welcoming and the name is music on your tongue.

The Drury Inn & Suites in Grove City, Ohio. Such elegance! They have a popcorn machine in the lobby.

Hotel California

Hotel Carter in NYC. Pure elegance.

They are hotels. Does anyone really care that much?

The Metropolitan

The Richemond will re-open next spring as soon as the Saudi & Emirati families start flying West for summer. Or a family will just buy it outright for their own use for 3 months in Geneve when its boiling in the Gulf...... Oh & for the month of the Auto Salon for private shopping & for random Christies auctions held next door & the Beau Rivage......... Love Geneve!!!!