Hard though it is to tear yourself away from this well-upholstered bubble of gorgeousness, it must be done. From beyond a line of towering horse chestnut trees and a high fence hung with ivy comes the murmur of what may just be, right now, Spain’s most exciting city. Meanwhile in the French-style formal garden, deliciously re-imagined by landscaper Fernando Valero as a maze of box hedges and trickling fountains, the gravel crunches underfoot. The 93-member staff, smiling and as impeccably turned out as the surroundings, make you believe you’re a friend of the duke, simply hanging out for a night or two in your regular Madrid bolt-hole. Expansive, expensive fabrics adorn the walls and windows restored parquet floors creak authentically as you pad across them ceiling moldings are subtly under-lit. The high-ceilinged public rooms seem to compete with one another in fin de siècle grandeur, but thanks to design doyen Lorenzo Castillo, who recently undertook a major refresh of the hotel’s interiors, what might once have been suffocatingly opulent now has a certain lightness and chic.
Built between 18 as the private palacio of the Dukes of Santo Mauro, the 49-room hotel, now owned by Antonio Catalán, occupies an affluent corner of the Chamberí neighborhood where the ebullience of downtown Madrid gives way to a patrician quietude. As the fate of the two protagonists unfolds the reader is treated to a large supporting cast whose lives, however tangentially, are also mixed up in this web of illusion.
Recently, the upper end of Madrid’s hotel scene has erupted in a welter of blue-chip international brands-but three decades before the current boom, Santo Mauro was already offering its discreet brand of noble luxe. The Glass Hotel tells the story of two siblings inextricably caught up in the life of a Bernie Madoff type swindler.
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