“We hate the term ‘boutique,’” sniffs hotelier Stephen Brandman, whose Manhattan flagship, 60 Thompson in fashionable SoHo, caters to chic guests with 100 contemporary rooms, a hopping lobby bar and an Asiatic dining room. Set to debut a Toronto satellite and several other New York and L.A. properties over the next two years, what the co-owner of the Thompson Hotel Group, a former executive at the industry’s monolithic InterContinental chain, actually objects to is the label. “It’s just a marketing term. Look at the Hudson,” says Brandman, who deliberately keeps room counts low, referencing Ian Schrager’s midtown address, “850 rooms—and they call it boutique? Sure.”
Actually, it’s 1,000—rooms that Schrager shoehorned into the space generally allotted for walk-in closets (150 square feet for a queen), claiming inspiration from “the romance of ocean travel.” While one might certainly feel compelled to romance anyone with whom we shared a cheek-to-cheek Hudson cubicle, cabin-sized rooms are an acknowledged “boutique” bane. Still, you have to hand it to him. Fuelled by New York’s exhilarating ’80s art scene, Schrager rebuffed traditional posh—a Persian rug here, a crystal chandelier there—and introduced Morgans in ’84. Then he enlisted madcap French designer Philippe Starck for a cutting-edge cavalcade—Royalton, Delano, Mondrian, Sanderson—that recreated the modern hotel industry.
By the late ’90s, W Hotels, under the Starwood conglomerate that counts Sheraton and Westin in its stable, was churning out the slick with the same remote efficiency as line workers at Ford bolting on car doors. The “cool” aesthetic spread like wildfire—to everywhere but Canada, a stronghold of big chain addresses. With the Hudson, Schrager has merely taken a formula he invented to its ultimate apotheosis—or antithesis, depending on how you view it.
When “boutique” finally arrived in Toronto—in 1999—the 28 rooms and restrained palette of Yorkville’s Windsor Arms offered a welcome counterpoint in a city littered with giant chains. While it soon became the celebrities’ discreet alternative to the nearby Four Seasons, the Windsor Arms lacked one requisite of the genre: the fashionable bar and restaurant. It was a curious lapse, given the hotel’s earlier incarnation: In its ’70s and ’80s glory years, coveted tables at its chic Three Small Rooms and Courtyard Café were scattered with Exile on Main St–era Rolling Stones and such glam femme fatales as the young Barbara Amiel.
Launched in 2003, the SoHo Metropolitan in Toronto’s theatre district, a more urbane affair than its two sister properties, nailed the chic cuisine angle, with Claudio Aprile helming its in-house fine dining room, Senses (now headed up by Patrick Lin). A year later, the studied anti-luxe of Queen West’s Drake Hotel, perhaps more “art” hotel than “boutique,” catered to its hipster guests with a cool roster of live performances and a hot spot bar, while across town, the Pantages Suites, Hotel & Spa, taking the opposite tack, installed a dedicated pastiche of off-the-rack modernity and prefab mid-century riffs, then revoked what élan the look aimed to offer by stashing a garish, neon-lit Fran’s Restaurant off its lobby—a gaffe that served only to emphasize its inelegant location, a block from the Eaton Centre
and brassy Yonge Street. Two years later, nightlife impresario Zark Fatah tucked tiny, sexy Doku 15 (now the Eight Wine Bar), into the Cosmopolitan hotel, opened in 2005.
