Orient Express, La Mamounia in Marrakech and the Excelsior Venice Lido in Venice: this is how the places of old-fashioned tourism still live.
La Mamounia, the Orient Express, the Excelsior Venice Lido are among the sacred places of vintage tourism. Places that history has consigned to myth, which have risen to the role of relics of a definitive gone era.
The one in which journeys lasted weeks, time did not stand still moved slowly and, above all, no one had the feeling of having none. Yet La Mamounia, the Orient Express, the Excelsior Venice Lido are always there, in their place, alive and frequented, ready to enter again and again in the memory of those who stop for a few days in their rooms.
A holiday for a few? Undoubtedly. An inappropriate luxury for the times? Depends. Because there are many good reasons to preserve beauty and transform it into a fragment of history that reaches us intact.
It is a testimony of devotion to man’s know-how, to culture, to a lineage of civilization that is lost over time and reverberates in a current situation – that of vintage tourism – which certainly has beauty much needed.
Architects and designers called upon to restore luster and immerse the splendor of historic and exclusive tourism in a contemporary frame are first and foremost required to engage in a spontaneous and cultures dialogue with the concept of luxury.
A design attitude that must momentarily overlook the inconsistencies with the contemporary and find a solution for the technological complexities and the different use of infrastructures. But the work is naturally above all on aesthetic choices, in the attempt to preserve and bring alive the grandeur of the past, without indulging in nostalgia.
The deep knowledge of artisan culture and the relationship with those who practice it daily are the true secret of a beauty that seems eternal and immutable.
Imagining an archetypal luxury place as part of the evolution of this world, perhaps to give life to vintage luxury tourism, is not easy. Yest everything continues, certainly not imperturbably, but solidly.