22 I Spotlight on... Washington DC
Beyond politics
T
he lobby lounge of the new hotel in Washington DC is filled with people seated on blue velvet couches under glittering chandeliers that would look at home in the Palace of Versailles. A bell rings, and, to a ripple of applause, a waiter slices the top off a bottle of champagne with a sabre. The glass- encased cork flies across the room and skids across the polished marble floor.
Opened in September 2016, two months before Donald
Trump’s election as the 45th president of the United States, the hotel occupies the prestigious Old Post Office on Pennsylvania Avenue. The location is prime, being on the street that connects the White House at one end to the US Capitol, home of Congress, at the other. Constructed in 1899, the building’s pièce de résistance is its 96-metre clock tower, the third-tallest structure in DC. Beneath a row of billowing Stars and Stripes flags, the main entrance is blocked off by metal barricades (access is from the side, on 11th Street). I see a man stop to stick his middle finger up at the gilded Trump International Hotel sign, and take a photo on his phone. The fact that the Trump Organisation is leasing this landmark from the government has caused controversy, but federal agency the General Services Administration says the agreement is valid. For a city that is roughly 90 per cent Democrat (only 4 per cent of DC’s votes went to the Republican party), Trump’s win is a bitter pill to swallow, and the fact that his name is emblazoned on a historic building hasn’t helped. One local tells me: “I will not set foot in that place; I will not give him one cent of my money.” Despite rates starting from US$550 a night, none of this has prevented the hotel’s 263 rooms from being sold out since opening. Still, Mickael Damelincourt, managing director of the Trump International Hotel Washington DC, says other hotels, such as the Four Seasons in Georgetown, are doing well too. “We don’t have enough luxury hotels in Washington,” he says. With US$200 million spent on renovations, the hotel is
Right: The Trump International Hotel in Washington DC’s Old Post Office
NOVEMBER 2017
arranged around a nine-storey glass atrium, crisscrossed with 19th-century gold girders. There is a spa designed by Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, a ballroom for 1,300 people, a Macallan whisky tasting room and a fine-dining steakhouse from David Burke.
businesstraveller.com
In Washington DC, as across the country, residents are adjusting to the Trump administration. But there is more to the US capital than monuments and government, discovers Jenny Southan
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