Cruise Ship with Retro Décor

Now for a brief shift from graphic art to Industrial Design / Interior Decoration -- subjects I occasionally touch on here.

Aside from two troopship journeys across the Pacific Ocean, I didn't do cruising until I married my late wife. I've been doing it a bit more the last couple of years, though I'm beginning to find cruising not as cost-effective as I'd like. That said, I recently cruised around Italy aboard a ship whose interior design was not what I have come to expect, and I thought I'd pass along a few thoughts and images regarding that.

The ship is MS Pacific Princess, owned by Princess Cruises -- Wikipedia entry here. As the entry notes, it is a relatively small main-line cruiser originally intended for sailing in the South Seas in the area of French possessions. Princess was not the original owner, though has operated it for most of its 20 years.

Gallery

Shown here off Split, Croatia, is the Pacific Princess. In the background is the Grand Princess -- as it happens, it is the only other Princess ship I've sailed on. The Pacific is about 600 feet (180 m) long and currently carries a little fewer than 800 passengers. Its size makes it handy for entering somewhat restricted ports of call. The Grand, on the other hand, is a typical large cruise ship. Its length is about 950 feet (290 m) and can carry around 3100 passengers.

The cruise ships I've sailed on feature interiors of mostly Modernist design. Shown above is the atrium of the new (2018) Holland America cruiser Nieuw Statendam, an extreme example of such décor.

Modernist interiors began to appear by the late 1920s on a few ships. Perhaps the most important example is the French Line's Île de France of 1927. Above is the smoking room in First Class.

Before that, transatlantic liners featured First Class zone interiors similar to those found in men's clubs or luxury hotels. Given the inhospitable character of the North Atlantic for much of the year, such décor helped distract passengers from the sea and provided a sense of familiarly along with expected comforts. Shown above is the smoking room of the RMS Olympic (1911), sister ship of the Titanic.

Smoking room of the SS Statendam (1929). Note the ceiling, as something akin to it will be seen below.

An older ship, the HAPAG SS Oceana of 1890, rebuilt in 1905. Less plush than the later, larger Atlantic liners.

The atrium of the Pacific Princess. I don't know if this was the original décor or if it's the result of a refurbishment. At any rate, the Pacific's public interior spaces featured various pre-1930 steamship interior themes. I found that a little odd when first coming onboard, but soon became used to it.

A passageway with lots of heavy, dark wood.

The library.  More dark wood. The ceiling here and in the atrium echo the sort of thing shown above on the SS Statendam and many other classic liners.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens' New Hampshire Home

Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907) was, in my opinion, one of America's greatest sculptors. I last wrote about him here.

In his later years, he lived in the Cornish art colony area of western New Hampshire. His house and grounds have been preserved, and now are operated by the U.S. National Park Service.

I visited the site in September and, of course, took some photos. Featured here are views of his house and its interior. Family members lived in the house until around 1919 when it was set up as a memorial, so what you see is probably fairly close to the way it was in Saint-Gaudens' time there. Interior decoration is not my field, so I leave it to you to interpret the various objects shown. There are also paintings and other works of art that appealed to him.

Click on images to enlarge.

Gallery

View of the house taken from the direction of his studio (the subject of a forthcoming post).

Living room.

Panning to the left.

Room across the hall.

Dining room.

Douglas DC-8 Interiors

I didn't fly often during the 1960s -- only 11 times by jetliner, the rest being military aircraft. Of those eleven flights, eight were on United Airlines Douglas DC-8s.

That was in the days when the U.S. government strongly regulated the airline industry -- routes for airlines were largely fixed in place, fares were high, and airlines had to compete mostly in terms of passenger service. Passengers, in turn, usually dressed up when on an airplane journey, men wearing jackets and neckties.

As can be seen below, Douglas DC-8 airlines had large windows, one per row of seats, giving passengers a fine view if a view was available. But this amenity, which provided plenty of legroom, prevented operators from increasing the number of seating rows. That "error" was soon corrected on later aircraft, as those of us who usually fly in "steerage" well know.

Below are some views of DC-8s and their accommodations.

Gallery

Eastern Air Lines DC-8 in flight
This is an early photo showing Eastern's livery at the time it started flying DC-8s. Note how large the windows are.  DC-8s had one window per side for each row of seats. This amenity prevented the addition of rows of seats that was possible for rival Boeing's 707 that had many smaller windows, a feature found on later-generation airliners.

Delta Airlines advertisement
It took several years before ramps from terminal waiting rooms to airliner doors became common. Here passengers are depicted using roll-away stairways.

Half of United Airlines advertisement spread
This seems to be featuring the first-class section.

SAS interior
Although the DC-8 was designed to seat cabin-class passengers three-abreast on each side of the center aisle, SAS had three-and-two seating on a least some of its DC-8s. So the seats shown here might be a little wider than on planes used by United Airlines and other American lines.

SAS interior
Another publicity photo of cabin-class. Note the leg room, the window curtains and ... oh yes, the snack being served.

SAS interior
I'm not sure if this is the first-class section or the three-plus-two seating arrangement. What's noteworthy in this photo is the overhead compartment. Luggage, coats and such would usually be stowed (tossed, actually) there, but here we see mostly SAS-furnished blankets, pillows and such.

Bits of Fancy Florida Hotels

It can be fun to visit fancy hotels even if you don't (or can't) pay the fancy fare to stay. We were in Florida the first half of February and did some hotel-crawling while there. Although we didn't rent rooms, we did dine at each of those shown below.

So far as I'm concerned, the grandest of the lot is The Breakers in Palm Beach. Its Web site is here and the Wikipedia entry here.

Not so grand, but about as old and still pretty nice is the Don Cesar on St. Pete Beach in the Tampa Bay area. The Wikipedia entry is here.

In Coral Gables, near Miami, is another 1920s grand hotel, the Biltmore, whose Wikipedia write-up can be found here.

Below are some photos I took. No thorough studies here, just snippets to provide a taste.

Gallery

The Breakers main lobby

The Breakers, at one end of the lobby hall

The Breakers HMF bar
Originally this room was the main dining area, but has been a bar for years. It was recently redecorated, perhaps with too large a dash of contemporary feeling.

The Breakers HMF bar
A close-up of the bar itself. The illustration is mid 1950s, but I don't know who did it. Nor do I know if it dates back to then or is a retro piece.

Don Cesar from the beach

Don Cesar, poolside

Don Cesar interior

Biltmore Coral Gables pool
The Biltmore has a huge pool. This was taken from the bar area.

Biltmore Coral Gables
Another view of the pool and main hotel structure from not far from where the previous photo was taken.

A Somewhat Deceptive Exterior

What they say about judgments based on books and their covers can be applied to buildings -- in some cases, anyway. For instance, I get the feeling that many places in Italy where residential streets are lined with buildings with drab, fading stucco exterior surfaces actually camouflage totally modern interiors. I know that to be the case for a Mestre hotel I once stayed in.

The same applies in a more limited sense in Dublin at a place called The Burlington Hotel. It is a large structure beyond the Grand Canal that roughly marks the edge of the old southern part of the city. The exterior, as can be seen below, is nondescript t-square and triangle modernism common in the 1950s and 1960s. Our room was in need of renovation, but not drastically so. After all, the hotel caters to tour groups such as ours as well as to people in town on business or for conferences, so maybe we weren't assigned the snazziest digs. But it was okay; no complaints from a guy who spent three years of his life in army barracks and troop ships.

What interested me were the public areas that differed considerably from the drab exterior. I don't know if these were part of the original package or added in later years. They certainly have the appearance of having been re-done in recent times.

Let's look:

Here is how the hotel looks from the street. A large parking lot with room for large tour buses connects the street with the entrance. Note the exterior's hotel room floors. It was probably at its best in the architect's presentation rendering.

The lobby presents a contrast. The reception desk is at the rear to the right. The rest of the scene is occupied by a lounge area. Nice polished stone floors, carpets, wood trim and other touches of a warm variation on modernism. Not nearly as stark as the exterior.

Yet another contrast. This is the restaurant. Many of the larger hotels I've experienced in the British Isles feature traditional (Edwardian?) style restaurants, and so does the Burlington. This room makes me suspect that it wasn't part of the original modernist package.

Dublin Nouveau

The Art Nouveau architectural/decorative movement of roughly 1890-1910 had considerable impact in several cities in the northern half of Europe: Prague, Riga, Brussels, Budapest and Paris quickly come to mind as boasting notable structures designed in that idiom.

One place Art Nouveau passed by was Dublin, Ireland. Now there might indeed be an Art Nouveau style building someplace in the town, but if there was, I missed it during three full days of traipsing around the city in August.

All was not lost! A helpful guidebook directed us to Dawson Street and the Café en Seine, a pub gloriously decorated with Art Nouveau style objects.

Take a look at some photos I took:

Gallery

Evolving Airport Terminals

I'm pretty sure it has been happening at a large airport near you. That's because airports for larger metropolitan areas seem to be continually under reconstruction. For this post, I'm referring to the evolution of the airport terminal.

Not all that many years ago terminals had waiting areas and a few news stands and a limited, "captive" (contracted out to a single supplier) set of restaurants and snack bars. Those restaurants and snack bars seemingly invariably had overpriced goods.

Then cracks in the system appeared. The one that impressed me was the appearance of a McDonald's hamburger stand in the Minneapolis terminal maybe 20 or more years ago. Now, in America, I don't notice any more of those single-contractor operations for food services (news stands still seem to be another story). Better yet, in many airports, the price of a McDonald's burger or a cup of Starbucks coffee is the same as it is off-site.

Behold the contrast with 60 years ago. My example is Seattle-Tacoma International Airport showing old photos found on the Web and a few I took recently.

These are views of waiting areas in the years before major changes occurred. The top photo shows a waiting area near the departure gates and the lower photo shows the main lounge. There was a restaurant with a view of the airplanes that was situated on the second floor beyond the far end of the main lounge.

A few years ago, the central part of the terminal including the main lounge (already re-done a time or two since the photo above was taken), was extensively rebuilt. The photos below indicate the result.

That sign in the background is both fairly recent and seriously tacky. I'm not sure that "captive" passengers within the security zone need to be prompted to spend, because they're likely to do so anyway.

Where the main lounge was is now a food court.

There's also a huge window where aircraft can be observed. Some airport amenities don't change.

Santa Barbara Biltmore: Inside Story

I sometimes wonder how many modernist hotels can be called lovable. Some are enjoyable because they function well or perhaps are in a really nice setting. But even though I might have fondness for them, I can't say I love them.

Certain older hotels are a different story, and it has to do with their architecture and interior decoration. One thing that was largely lost once modernism became the religion of architecture was a connection to deep levels of human psychology; pure geometric forms of glass and metal do not suggest comforting shelter to the extent traditional architecture does.

To illustrate the non-modernist side of this coin, consider the Santa Barbara Biltmore. Well, that's not its actual name: it is actually the Four Seasons Resort The Biltmore Santa Barbara. And it's not actually in Santa Barbara, but in Montecito, a ritzy town just east of there.

The hotel website is here and the Wikipedia entry here. As Wikipedia indicates, the hotel was renovated a few years ago with an eye to restoring the Spanish Colonial style building as reasonably as possible to its appearance at its 1927 opening.

Almost every time we drive into the Santa Barbara area, my wife insists that we stop by the Biltmore (most locals don't use the Four Seasons name), and I put up no resistance to the request.

Below are some photos I took of some of the the public areas during our latest visit.

Gallery

The guy you see is Yr Faithful Blogger, camera in firing position.

Here is a direct shot of the hallway shown in the mirror above. In the far distance is the check-in desk with a map mural behind it.

Through the lounge window is the main dining area. Originally it was a garden, but it was roofed over many years ago. The recent restoration resulted in changes to the dining area, but not reversion to garden status.

The same lounge from a different angle; the window to the dining area is at the right.

The two photos above show some of the objets d'art found in the lounge.

Objects at the end of the hall shown in the first photos. In the mirror can be glimpsed the concierge desk and a mural of early Santa Barbara.