Joie de Vivre
That’s the name of the hotel chain that owns the Domain hotel in Sunnyvale, CA. I’m liking it a lot. The room is huge (especially after tiny Paris hotel room); if this were a studio apartment in Soho, you could sell it for a half million bucks.
Other nice touches: an iPod dock, curtains over the full-length mirror for when you don’t feel like seeing yourself stumbling to the bathroom in the middle of the night, interesting lamps and other accessories (though they lose a point for not having completed transition to compact fluorescents). Heat lamp in the bathroom, a necessity in weird climates like Bay Area where it’s chilly when it should be warm. I didn’t try the Sleep Number bed, but it’s amusing that it’s here. Also, they have a local wine happy hour several days a week, which I’ll miss since the Yahoo! hosts of my conference are wining and dining us superlatively.
Downsides: it’s in quintessential Silicon Valley: the room is on the first floor facing a parking lot and a highway; the surrounding landscape is car-dominated. There are in fact many small non-chain businesses (quite interestingly looking ethnic restaurants, an Asian nail parlor, etc. ) extremely nearby but it’s hard to imagine how they could make it less inviting to take a walk and discover them, lost in their parking lots off of the uncrossable El Camino Real. As much as I love many people who live in this area, I just will never get it how anyone with the tiniest belief of having control over her own destiny could choose to live somewhere where driving was this central. I know, I’m unAmerican.
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