Baths have feather-filled pillows
It is four years since the gal was in the most extraordinary hotel in São Paulo, Hotel Unique, and this time even more peculiarities appear. The building, see above, is, from front on, like a seven floor-high green melon segment supported on tall concrete legs: apparently the young owner, a pharma heir called Jonas Siaulys, asked architect Ruy Ohtake, to come up with something that was really memorable, and it sure is. In front of the main entrance, on Avenida Brigadero Luis Antonio, is a low-set garden with a constantly-running foot-wide canal, that works as well as the £13-million lazy-canal memorial to Princess Diana in London’s Hyde Park does NOT work. Go up to your floor in a barely-lit elevator, and unusually all odd numbers are one end of the corridor, all even numbers the other.
Unusual gym entrance
The 95 bedrooms all have four-foot circular windows, and a frosted-glass wall between bed area and bathroom area can be pushed up, concertina-style. Everything in your space, apart from the wood flooring, is white – with one exception, namely a transparent bath pillow filled with green feathers, as shown above left. Room corridors, which snake around rooms facing one way and rooms facing the other, are nearly completely dark at night, which means making sure you do not fall over fire extinguishers and discarded room service trays. Want colour? Ah had xxx? , head down to the three-floor indoor wellness centre, which opens at six a.m. Go in through a blue door or, for females, a pink door, which leads you along a pink-lit wall, at the end of which is a two-foot wide walkway.
Unusual gym floor (glass, looking down to an inside pool)
This is gym for Gisele not gorillas. Through your appropriate changing room, you take a walkway bridge over yellow and blue swimming pools a floor below (a grey water chute down into them is suspended high above you). Now you go down 19 steps, into the gym, which is a master xxx? of how many pieces of Technogym equipment you can fit into a small space. There are no Englsh-language television channels, but who cares? All items have an assortment of games, and as Girlahead addicts know, I really love playing sudoku while zapping up the calorie scale – and here, uniquely, I look down past the jogger and through the glass floor to the pools beneath.
Stand-out caprese
One thing that is consistently lovely about this luxury hotel is its food, but as I have said before it is essential to book ahead for lunch or dinner. I love sitting outside, by yet another pool, looking through cactus-decorated glass walls at the panorama of the sprawling city. I love the breakfasts, especially the papaya, really tasty wholegrain toasting bread and fried eggs that unusually spend most of their cooking time under a strong grill. And some love, at lunch and dinner, the signature caprese, with basil icecream, that is the automatic starter, at every meal. NOW TAKE A TOUR OF THE HOTEL’S LOBBY, BELOW.
