Felicitous fusion of great concept and inspired execution

UNUSUAL hotels and restaurants were featured on a cable show.

Our continuing video voyages now take us to a lifestyle cable channel, where a show on unusual hotels and restaurants wins our prize for the best discovery of the month.

Since we love the arts and want them not to get trapped in galleries, but to impinge on people’s lives, we found the show a special viewing treat, because it showcased several lodging and dining establishments that did just that.

A small, 40-room hotel featured on the show rang our bells with its great and “artistically welcoming” concept:

The hotel owner contacted a number of artists whose unique output he’d liked through the years—and he invited them to each “take over” an empty room in his snug, little establishment and fill it with art pieces!

Artists being uniquely creative and idiosyncratic visionaries, each room has a special personality, atmosphere or quirk all its own, so hotel guests have an excitingly varied smorgasbord of moods and lifestyles to “plug into” for the night!

Some of the choices available to them are truly exotic and even weird—like a room dominated by the huge snout of a horse sticking out of the wall and sniffing nuzzlingly at you as you’re lying in bed!

Now, counting sheep to get to sleep is one thing, but this could keep you awake and neighing in equine nirvana all night!

Even better, after you delight in the idiosyncratic pleasures of a room one night, the very next day, you can opt for an entirely different artistic “trip” and kick, and stay in the room that pays dark “tribute” to Vincent van Gogh!

No, his severed ear isn’t  on the floor, so you don’t need to walk on artistic eggs—and legs!

We thank our lucky TV stars for “stumbling” across this unique show in the course of our viewing peregrinations.

Thanks, too, to the artists and hotelier who came up with this felicitous fusion of great concept and its inspired execution.

The bonus for the artists involved in the small boutique hotel for all tastes and trips is the fact that, every time each room is rented for the night, the “creator” involved got a cut of the rental fee.

After all, it was his or her “environment” and art that got the visitor hooked and “sold” in the first place!

To be sure, this “environmental” approach to the hotel trade is not unique to the establishment featured on the show on unusual hotels and restaurants we viewed.

A number of motels  in the Philippines have some “fantasy” rooms like “Blue Hawaii” and “James Bond” suites to excite adventurous couples and introduce them to the seductive delights of “role-playing!”

But, the show’s featured boutique hotel takes the kicky concept up several notches, so we hope other establishments “idiosyncratically” follow suit!