Money
Making money
You can't take it with you - the starriest hotels
It's only money. Blow it before the taxman takes it. How about treating the other half to an intimate night in a hotel?
In which hotel? There are so many to chose from. How about hopping across to Cannes for a city-break and staying at the Hotel Martinez. Take their Penthouse Suite. It is their best. It has a private terrace with a jacuzzi, and sweeping views of the Mediterranean. Go on. You can afford it.
It is only $37,000 a night, or £18,120 if you are paying in sterling. They bill it as the most expensive hotel suite in the world. But you do get four bedrooms in that - so you could take some friends along to make up the numbers and split the cost. But then perhaps the night wouldn’t be so intimate after all.
All right, let's move downmarket, somewhere cheaper where we can be alone. Dubai, that might do us. The Burj Al Arab is the hotel that you see on the ads for Dubai, the one that is in the shape of a billowing sail. It stands on its own artificial island in the bay, it is the tallest hotel in the world - you could fit the Eiffel Tower inside it - and parts of the hotel lobby are plated in 24-carat gold.
But forget the lobby, you'll not want to leave your private room - which you have reached, of course, by your private elevator. Specifically, you'll not want to leave the indoor jacuzzi, the private cinema, or - unless you are feeling too dizzy - the rotating bed in it. And all for less than you'd pay at Cannes, where the beds rather pathetically stay still: a mere $28,000 - £13,700 - for the night.
But if you want to be where the action is, try New York. Blow an extra thousand pounds on the Ty Warner suite at the Four Seasons hotel. Ty Warner is a billionaire who made his money out of the craze - you may remember it - for Beaney Babies. He is clearly a man of taste. The suite named after him occupies the entire 58th floor. You get a main room, a library, a master bedroom with four-poster, and a spa; each room has floor-to-ceiling bay windows and skylights You get four balconies, one on each side of the building; they are glassed in, of course, reached through double-height French windows. You also get an indoor Zen garden complete with working waterfall, and a breakfast room. I.M.Pei designed it all.
Occupy it for the night and you come home to a real fire - a working fireplace a few hundred feet above Manhattan; you get a telescope to look in at other people's windows, or perhaps just to look down on lesser folk, and a Bosendorfer grand piano in case you want to serenade your inamorata or sing music-hall songs.
Your own butler, of course, is on call 24 hours a day, and there's free use of a Rolls Royce and chauffeur when you go out. And the marble bathroom has a bath with an infinity edge, which makes the water seem to lap over nothing but empty space and go on forever, plus a 'chromatherapy' feature which makes the water change colour as you bathe - and I don't mean with soap and dirt either. I think they do it with hidden lights.
Oh, and they are willing, if you ask them, to convert the spa into a temporary extra guest-room, just in case you want to bring more than one friend. I imagine, from the $30,000 price that you are paying, that they do more than just open up a sofa bed for him.
* Written by Julian Champkin
