Few material things in life are more exciting than the right kind of hotel room. The kind with a large television and a well-stocked video collection; with a minibar laden with jelly beans and paprika-flavoured crisps; with a bathroom decked with fluffy white towels, robes and a collection of miniature bottles of shampoo; with a thick room-service menu offering all-night dining. The chance to stay in a nice hotel can be capable of convincing even the inconsolable that life is worth living. The best hotel rooms achieve their distinctive charm in part because they combine the advantages of a modern commercial environment, and all the newness and shininess we associate with them, with the advantages of home where we can wander around naked, pick our noses with impunity and feel private and unwatched. For a few nights, the place we call home resembles an idealised version of what our own homes might be like, if only we could afford to repair the cracks in the walls and change all the furniture. To stay in one of the Ian Shrager hotels -- St. Martins Lane or Sanderson in London, for example -- feels like stepping into a shiny and perfect magazine world. With their brisk efficiency and soothing colour schemes, these hotels allow us to think of life as something that might for ever be beautiful, calm and comprehensible. Good hotels are also a profound source of a feeling of love. How might a word generally used only in relation to what we get from a parent or a romantic companion be applied to something we might be offered by a hotel? Perhaps we could define love as a kind of attentiveness; a sensitivity by one person to another's existence. Advertisements for the Four Seasons hotel chain constantly emphasize the love that is showered on its guests; we see a maid hunting for just the right pillow, so that sleep of guests will be deep and soul- restoring--the kind of care we might last have experienced when we were ill as a child and pampered in bed by a devoted parent who brought toast soldiers and allowed us to watch television all day. Hotel rooms can be wonderful places in which to think. It is no coincidence that many of the 20th Century's greatest novels were written in hotel rooms. An unfamiliar setting offers an opportunity to escape our habits of mind: lying in bed, the room quiet except for the occasional swooshing of an elevator in the innards of the building, we can draw a lien under what preceded our arrival, and we can overfly great and ignored stretches of our experience. All that said, there can be nothing worse than finding that one is not happy in a beautiful hotel, I recall going to stay at the Old Cataract in Aswan, Egypt, with a girlfriend a few years ago. The setting was idyllic, and yet one day at lunch, we managed to have an argument (about nothing) in the hotel dining room, which spoilt the entire experience. We tell into a deep sulk and returned to our room. It had been cleaned in our absence. The bed had fresh linen. There were flowers on the chest of drawers and new towels in the bathroom. I tore one from the pile and went to sit on the veranda, closing the French windows violently. The trees were throwing a gentle shade, the crisscross patterns of the palms occasionally rearranging themselves in the afternoon breeze. But there was no pleasure in such beauty. It had become irrelevant that there were soft towels, flowers and attractive views. My mood refused to be lifted by any external prop; it even felt insulted by the perfection of the hotel. The misery of that afternoon was a reminder of the fickle nature of our spirits. When we encounter a picture of a beautiful hotel, and imagine that happiness must naturally accompany such magnificence, we should remember how quickly it can be made insignificant by one sulk. And yet, of course, that should never be enough to stop us checking in. In a nice