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THE DEATH OF COOL

Ever notice how everything "cool" looks the same? Timothy Taylor did – and writes an epitaph for the end of an idea.

Text: TIMOTHY TAYLOR

1 | 2 | 3 | JAN

I don’t think the St. Martins Lane Hotel is having the intended effect on me. This nexus of urban cool – the pinnacle expression of the boutique hotel in London – leaves me feeling as cool as I’d feel hanging out at a mall. Sure, all the globalized hip bits are in place. High-concept fusion restaurant: Asia de Cuba. Lobby full of Philippe Starck design ideas: garden-gnome coffee tables, baroquely gilded chairs, ethereal video loops projected onto the doors of the exclusive Light Bar. Then there’s the whole fab-modern package of the building itself, a neo-Eastern Bloc Wallpaper* magazine esthetic of white surfaces, blond wood and wild splashes of colour provided here by orange throws and bilious yellow accents. And over it all, or behind it somewhere I can’t place, the pumping soundtrack of the cool-stream globalized West. Deep house and AM Top 40 commingled.

"Small, unique and ultrafashionable, boutiques launched the current resurgence of hotels as design palaces, social meccas and urban jewels." So sings the literature for the recent show New Hotels for Global Nomads at the National Design Museum in New York. There’s no denying that St. Martins Lane is popular. The six-metre-high revolving door has not stopped spinning since I arrived. The sleekly uniformed staff have had no rest. Vuitton and Samsonite have flowed non-stop from the taxis out front, down the hallway to the fishbowl blue of the elevators, where monitors play endless clips of crashing waves and guests are wafted on a sonic cloud of Moby up into the pearl-white minimalism of the tiny rooms.

Which would all be pretty cool given my humdrum expectations for a business hotel – extra pillows, data port – but for a sense enveloping me that I am part of some enormous global herd. Haven’t I seen these Light Bar patrons before? The trendy Japanese kids, the young moneyed Russians, the American hip hoppers and the crowd of suburbanites checking themselves out, all wondering if they measure up. Aren’t the same people sitting at this very moment at the bar in the Sanderson or the Hudson in NYC? Or even the Opus Hotel, a Global Nomad oasis in far-away Vancouver? Brits with brushed aluminium PowerShot S400s, check. Eastern European model, got it. And that bridge-and-tunnel girl adjusting her thong strap between sips of a too-big caipirinha – haven’t I seen her in every design-oriented one-off hipster hostelry of the Western world? I’m sitting on a lobby stool shaped like a molar tooth, and I am completely clueless as to where I might be.

Let’s call this condition ag-o-ram-ne-sia (n) The sensation of being in a public place and being unable to remember which, of many similar places, it might actually be [fr. Gk agora place or assembly + NL, fr. Gk amnesia forgetfulness]. The last time I felt this way was when I was entering Edmonton and passing that six-kilometre stretch of fast-food franchises and box stores that lard the inbound arteries of virtually every city in North America. But if the St. Martins Lane Hotel – gathering together the coolest memes in architecture, food, fashion, design and attendant livery – is coming off as some kind of coconut-scented, orange pashmina-draped generica, then what exactly is cool?

The answer is: nothing. Because cool is dead, my friends. Not because it was co-opted by corporate brands. And not because I’m turning 40 and having a kid. It’s dead because we killed it, and dead it shall remain. Nada y pues nada y pues nada, amen.

Understand that this isn’t about St. Martins Lane. They’re not responsible for the death of cool; they’re only an attractively located mausoleum to the concept. It’s mid-morning now. I’m walking the streets of London and loving it. It feels like the centre of the universe. Sidewalks jammed, the languages of many continents babbling around me. I’m having breakfast in Soho, watching the jets coming in overhead. Every 40 seconds, another jumbo jet glinting down toward Heathrow as if guided on a wire. These are people arriving, of course. But ideas too. Ideas about business and fashion, food and technology. Resilient old ideas. Untested new ones. Ideas moving like independent travellers. Going where they wish. Staying where they’re well hosted. For a moment, I can actually see ideas flashing through the sky, just as ideas are at this very moment being packeted and shuttled by routers along the phone lines and fibre optic cables that grid the West.

1 | 2 | 3 | JAN