Chrome Extinguishers and Hotel Design

Fire extinguishers aren't just nice safety features to have around anymore. The prevalence of chrome extinguishers in modern hotel and restaurant design is starting to revolutionize how the public thinks about one of the inescapable fixtures of modern life: visible safety features.

It's been acceptable practice to mix function and form liberally for some time now. Changes in the law and advances in the technology and apparatus needed for building and displaying a light fixture that meets the modern safety code, for example, allowing interior designers to ensure public safety and still dazzle onlookers with sleek green glass fire exit signs and other helpful glow-in-the-dark signage.

But for a real example of the new design aesthetic working its magic, there's no better showcase than the Caesar Hotel Hyde Park in London.

The Caesar Hotel is known for being a discount hotel for weekend and other short duration travelers to the Hyde Park/Kensington Gardens area. People like to stay there due to its location, its proximity to local subway stations, and its price, easily one of the lowest in the region for the caliber of hotel.

But the Caesar Hotel wasn't without its share of problems. Online travel advisory reports from 2003 to 2005 talk extensively about the small size of the rooms, the lack of amenities, the mold by the windows, the paint flaking from the walls. Mattresses were hard, rooms were small, and the televisions were stocked with free pornography for grizzled customers to enjoy. One irate traveler whose room was broken into found management unresponsive about the issue. Another was promised a trouser press with his room and never received it.

And one other complaint: the noise. Apparently the hotel was doing a great deal of construction work. Guests complained about the dirt in the yard, the loud noise at night, and the constant hurly-burly of the hotel building--something. Perfecting itself.

Some insects begin their lives as caterpillars, larvae--shambling along, oozing, doing nothing but what it takes to survive. Then they slowly seal themselves off in cocoons and they wait for the moment of transformation.

That moment of transformation arrived for the Caesar Hotel in 2006, when the scaffolding and work crews were finally gone.

The travel reports suddenly change radically. The rooms are too small, yes. But travelers gush about the beautiful headboards, the gleaming walls, the modern restaurant and furniture. The number of travel reports starts to increase swiftly, all of them glowing.

In particular, the reports talk about the hotel's new super-modern lobby--and the burnished extinguishers hanging and gleaming from every sleek bracket.

It's a modern Cinderella story--never mind that the protagonist in this case is a hotel rather than a scullery maid. The staff of the hotel remained the same throughout; the layout of the rooms remained the same. Only the decor changed to become more modern while losing none of its classic hotel feel and function. The chrome extinguishers were all in place. For designers hoping to capture a feeling of wealth and modernity, that alone might be sufficient.

To appease the designer in you, see the beautiful chrome fire extinguishers at http://www.FireProtectionOnline.co.uk

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