Word: langham
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Fans of old Shanghai style rejoice: another of the city's Art Deco beauties has been buffed, polished and restored to its former shine, this time by Langham Hotels...
...onetime Yangtze Hotel on Hankou Road - now called the Langham Yangtze Boutique - was built 75 years ago to cater for the city's Chinese élite. Designed by Li Pan, a popular architect of the day, it was an ostentatious project, costing 1.2 million silver dollars (or about $325 million in today's money) and featured a host of mod cons - like air-conditioning - that were then becoming standard in luxury international hotels but represented heady advances for locally financed properties. Tycoons, heirs, heiresses and film stars flocked to the Yangtze's opening. The hotel's nightclub, the Yangtze Dance...
...hint of history but sacrificing most of their charm during unsympathetic - the uncharitable might say "tacky" - renovations conducted down the decades. Not surprisingly, the hotel's new management decided to put a reassertion of 1930s style at the forefront of a lavish renovation project completed earlier this year. The Langham Yangtze Boutique now boasts the kind of rooms and public spaces that a tuxedo-clad Noel Coward would have enjoyed lolling about in, gimlet in hand - think period-style furnishings, a lavish deployment of geometric patterns and motifs, and a masculine color palette of chocolate, cream and deep...
Diners can choose from T'ang Court (an outpost of the two-Michelin-star Cantonese restaurant at the Langham's Hong Kong flagship), an Italian restaurant and a Japanese izakaya. The Chuan Spa, a feature of all Langham properties, is there to administer to the overfed and the overworked with its toxin-eliminating scrubs and soothing unguents...
...Many hotels will note a returning guest's favorite pillow or drink, but, with your permission, Langham Place will also collect your most frequently dialed numbers and load them onto the touchscreen phone in your room, so that home or head office need only be a fingertip away. Staff can also program the device to display stock quotes based on your own portfolio, as well as news and weather bulletins from your hometown. The Web-enabled phones can even be pre-tuned to your favorite online radio stations. Best of all, if you forward snapshots of your loved ones prior...