GOLDEN HOTELS.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 2430, 19 February 1909, Page 5

GOLDEN HOTELS.

HOW -MILLIONAIRES ARE _ CATERED FOR.

i Novelists, such as Mr Upton Sinclair, have recently depicted in lurid colors the luxury in which the millionaire tenants of the hotel palaces or New York live and have their be‘ing. But no writer’s imagination has 5 ot- invented anything approaching the extravagance of the latest enterprise of one of the newest >and greatest of Fifth Avenue caravanserais. In order to meet the tastes of its wealthy patrons the management of the establishment have engaged a staff of 2d gold and silver smiths who are to devote their energies henceforth to the manufacture of golden dinner services and silver cundelabra and door-knobs. One of the first products of the workshop, which is situated on the second floor of the hotel, will be a dinner service of gold suitable for seven courses to seventy-five persons. Apparently the celebrated service employed by Mrs Hetty Green, tire great woman financier, when she gave a banquet to a select- few of the “four hundred” is no longer gorgeous, enough, for the new service is to be modelled after one which has been part of the family plate of the Duke of Westminster for m‘niy 3-ears. As each course is served, dishes made of hammered gojd. of the value of £7O each, will be placed on larger dishes, valued at £l5O, and then set before the guests. Even now the silver used in the hotel is estimated to be worth £50.000, and a staff of special repairers and cleaners are constantly- engaged on it. Now, the manager says, it will probably prove more economical to replace the bronze fittings of the hotel with silver. In the manufacture of silver candelabra he announces that designs will bo chosen according to the individual tastes of tlie tenants, who, it is satirically- suggested to-day, will probably soon demand golden bathtubs, turquoise handbasins, and fingerbowls made, like the snuffbox in “Monte Christo,’ from split emeralds. The magnificent hotels of* New York have been described as intended to “provide exclusiveness for tlie masses,” and there are probably 200,000 rich Americans in the metropolis enjoying this exclusiveness on a-soa-lo of 'unexampled extravagance. One of tlie latest fads practised in an hotel whose name is in Europe is for the lady guests to wear dresses of feathers and flowers harmonising with tho dominant .color of _ the- dining-rooms..