Arising from many years of travels and visits throughout Europe, North America, the Near East and the Orient, this examination of the luxury hotel is an architectural and social history that covers the world from the 1830s to the 1930s, but also takes note of recent refurbishments. The styles of architecture and decor have varied enormously for grand hotels: that of a French Renaissance chateau for the Canadian Pacific Railroad in the 1880s, a fantastic Moorish-style confection for the Tampa Bay on Florida's Gulf Coast (1891), Art Deco for Oliver Hill's seaside Midland Grand at Morecambe (1933). And the services available were equally dramatic: Turkish baths, rifle ranges, a rooftop cycle-track, and even a fleet of vintage Rolls-Royces at Hong Kong's Peninsula. To keep this illusory world glittering, the reality had to run like clockwork, with managers such as Cesar Ritz, king of hoteliers, monitoring every detail from ballrooms to basement boilers. The book explores many aspects of this all-but-vanished world of opulence, from the entrepreneurs, architects and designers who made it possible to the ambitious individuals and dynasties that kept it going.