The genius of the hotel is that it performs several functions simultaneously. It shelters, nourishes, becalms, entertains, and replenishes, all at once. Historically, restaurant culture and tourism grew out of the hotel, not the other way around. The modern hotel, girdling the planet in ever-larger chains, is a microcosm of all the things that human beings want when they are liberated from the chains of sedentary domesticity — including the comforts of sedentary domesticity.

While I am in Asia, I am often based in Bangkok. The city has the best hotels in the world, but there is one…

It’s been 74 years since the British novelist James Hilton published Lost Horizon, his fictional account of a utopian valley in Tibet called “Shangri-la.” Hilton’s tale of a group of westerners, kidnapped by a Tibetan pilot on an airfield in India and flown against their wills to a remote valley in Tibet, is a curious mixture of mad improbability and life-like detail. Isolated, walled in by mountains, Shangri-la is intensely unfamiliar — perhaps, our author heavily suggests, because it isn’t unhappy. Ruled by a lamasery, its inhabitants live to 150, and jazz is outlawed. Vice, like…

Whenever I stay in a Marriot I find it useful to remember that J. Willard Marriott, the American who founded the world’s biggest hotel group in 1959, was once a Mormon missionary. He was known for dropping in on his properties and terrorizing his employees by running a finger along every shelf in the hotel kitchen: a mote of dust on Willard’s finger and you were in trouble. Willard invented a kind of scrupulosity today associated with the very concept of luxury. Luxury as not only freedom from dust but from cultural specificity. A Marriott hotel was like a capsule from a blissful…