Hotel Madera 
Washington, DC

Hotel Madera manages to be both elegant—sometimes strikingly so—and down home. Under the Madera’s curb-to-door marquee, a tiny bamboo water garden sits in a simple stone bench. In the nearly lobby-less—keeps out the lobbyists—sculpted stained glass panels, golden and blue, hang like magnificent petals above angular contemporary chairs. The small sitting area has stacks of news junkies’ daily fixes. Cold milk and Oreo cookies are nearby if the news is not good. At the stroke of six, for one hour, the lobby morphs into the complimentary wine bar scene.

The congenial staff greets guests from behind a leather-bound reception desk, quickly sending them off to their capital pied-à-terre. In my room, center stage was a high, dark-chocolate headboard padded in cobalt blue mohair and piled with crushed silk and zebra-striped toss pillows. Duponi silk curtains close out the balcony’s city views. Off the entry, a big slab of black granite shoulders a sink and Aveda vendibles. Blue velvet curtains an ample closet and just beyond, silver foil papers a petite toilette-avec-bath.

The desk has complimentary high-speed internet access, a cordless speakerphone and voice mail—no one really comes to Washington to get away do they? When you’ve sent the last email, you can collapse on the long couch and stare at the tube Or, settle into the comfortable chair, turn on the good reading light and get your cold milk (2% or whole) from micro-sized retro refrigerator and start pulling apart an Oreo cookie to lick out the white stuff in the center.

If milk and cookies don’t make up your complete diet, downstairs the Madera’s restaurant, Firefly, services three very hip squares a day. If Firefly is fully booked, as it was the evening I was there—OK, it was Valentine’s Day—you are just a stroll away from cheap-cheerful ethnic to cushy-chic eats. One block from Dupont Circle, the hotel is in a real chess-playing, coffeehouse-bookstore, deli-laden DC neighborhood with some of the best transportation connections in the city.

But the Hotel Madera feels less like a trip and more like a life.

 Kate Crawford      May  2006

LINKS WITH ATTITUDE                           

The Hotel Madera, Washington DC on the web.