Hotel description

The design hotel as we’ve known it is dead. In this corner of the world at least — whatever you can get away with calling the U.K. and Ireland collectively without starting a blood feud — the white-walled minimalist-Zen hotel is so very last century. In its place is the new breed of luxury hotel, one that replaces the old austerity with a shameless (if slightly ironic) conspicuous consumption.

The Dylan, in Dublin, is a luxury hotel of the new breed. Not to be confused with the Dylan in Amsterdam, this one is a one-off, a Victorian-era nurses’ boardinghouse converted into a 44-room boutique, one whose room descriptions read like a passage from <em>American Psycho</em>: Frette linens on Seventh Heaven beds, Etro bath products, Bang & Olufsen phones, Bose iPod docking stations and Philips LCD televisions, all mixed in with Murano glass chandeliers and custom antique-style furnishings. Space is generous, and materials are luxe — think leather and textured wallpaper, rather than blond wood and poured concrete.

Pop down for the obligatory cocktail at the Dylan’s pewter bar, where one imagines bankers or brokers (or newly minted biotech millionaires, or whatever it is they’ve got in Ireland) popping bottles of Krug champagne and toasting the Celtic Tiger. The restaurant, Still, is as white and glossy as the rest of the Dylan is rich and velvety, and Padraic Hayden’s modern-Irish cooking has Dubliners lining up out the door.