Tourists on a terrace in Lisbon, Portugal. (Francisco Leong/AFP/Getty Images)
The last time I travelled to Barcelona, my partner and I stayed in a characterless hotel, but it was cheap and a block from the beach. We got lost looking for the Vogue-endorsed boutique we’d read about, but found 10 more shops in its place. Our dinner was so-so, but our waiter gave an impromptu performance of My Way and the patrons at the next table helped us with our Spanish. When we got home, we had little to brag about — no movie stars spotted, no Michelin-approved meals ingested — just a smug feeling that we’d conquered the city our own way. And we had enough cash left over for another vacation that year.
Were I heading back to Barcelona tomorrow, I could choose from two dozen guidebooks, from the which-way-to-the-Irish-pub standby Let’s Go to my parents’ Fodors. Until recently, the most popular publishers for English speakers were Rough Guide and Lonely Planet. Both are inclined toward the young and the childless, but bar word of mouth, they were all most of us really needed: museums were covered, maps got you from that obscure church on the hill to the vintage shop nobody had heard of in the previous year, they recommended pizza-by-the-slice or nouveau dim sum. And there was an underlying implication that after you’d cherry-picked the best restaurant tips, you’d probably do your own thing.
But go to a bookstore today and what do you see? The new city guides put out by Wallpaper magazine; the Cool Cities handbooks by San Francisco publisher Pulse; the Purple guides; the A Hedonist’s Guide to… series; City Secrets; the Mr. & Mrs. Smith series; Le Cool; Hip Hotels… Shall I go on?
The titles are either cool by association (Wallpaper) or proclamation (Hip Hotels). These are the Henry Higgins of guidebooks, and they will stage-manage your experience down to the last cappuccino. According to these “experts,” holidays are for exploring … where fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg holes up and super-producer Pharrell Williams once popped open a bottle of Cristal. The exhibit on fashion photographer Mario Testino: OK. Marks & Spencer: not.
Like the people they hope will read them, the new guard of guides are beautiful, with spare design and a been-there-done-that attitude. The Hedonist guides resemble a Moleskine notebook. The Wallpaper manuals, co-produced by art book publisher Phaidon, have cryptic monochrome covers resembling Pantone chips. The logic is that you can install yourself in a Philippe Starck hotel lobby/guerrilla boutique/mullets-only café, pull out your little helper and no one would be the wiser.
(Pulse Guides)
If you take Cool Cities to Paris, you can spend an hour at the Musée Baccarat, then make like singer Jane Birkin and pop into Drugstore Publicis, a hipster playground with an art-house cinema and high-end magazine shop. Wrap up at Musée de la Contrefaçon, where you can learn to spot a fake Fendi bag, and you’ve fit the Cool Cities mould. If only somebody could just tell you how to get to Notre Dame cathedral.
Cool Cities works on the assumption that you’ll be in town for three days and thus offers three recommendations in 33 categories (from “Vodka Cocktails” to “Chic Museums”); that way, you’ll have something stylish to do every moment. Its philosophy, publisher Alan Davis told me, is this: “Life is short – people shouldn’t waste time navigating through a city. Instead, they should be helped to enjoy the peak experiences.”
The books spoon-feed you itineraries, so nothing is left to your imagination. In Paris, that means no stumbling upon that local designer en route to Vuitton. No restaurant roulette. No Louvre. Actually, Cool Cities does mention the Louvre – it just doesn’t tell you how to cope with all that art once you’re there. But what’s the point anyway, says Cool Cities, when you can hit the Yves Saint Laurent museum instead?
Davis says he conceived the guides after a mid-life crisis got him thinking about having more fun. And it shows. A self-described “zoomer” (“a boomer with a zest for life”), Davis is just the sort of customer Mr. & Mrs. Smith is looking for.
The three-year-old London-based series coaches its readers on how to avoid chintz, where to source antiques and where the British Tories go for fun. Positioned as democratic – which means there’s at least one £50 hotel to make up for the dozen that top £300 – the guides are undeniably elitist, written by the sort of VIPs who think a four-star hotel is “slumming” it. (Chef Raymond Blanc and designer Stella McCartney are among the contributors.)
The series covers 19 European cities, but keeps a safe distance from what it deems a lost cause. “We checked out Istanbul,” says publisher Andrew Grahame, “but there were too many moustaches.” It’s good to know somebody is looking out for us.
Mr. & Mrs. Smith separates the washed from the unwashed; never will readers have to endure carpeted bathrooms, buck-toothed concierges or visits to Beatrix Potter museums or Legoland. If you keep up with the Smiths, you too can feel like Stella McCartney. Only you’re not. And you won’t be treated like you are.
(Le Cool)
Even more curious are the Wallpaper guides, which come sans maps but chock-full of design porn — titillating centerfolds of undulating steel and Murano glass chandeliers. As you’d expect, style takes precedence over substance. The guides are a meagre pocket size and run to just 100 pages — not counting the 16 blank ones allotted for “sketches” – with entire spreads, in some cases, devoted to a single bar (populated entirely, you can expect, by Wallpaper readers). See Amsterdam through Wallpaper’s eyes – the hotel with pods for bathtubs, the club where “mafiosi [lie] prostrate on extra-wide white banquettes” – and, well, you might as well be in London. Or New York. Or Toronto.
One travel editor told me, “It was all pictures and captions. If you wanted to learn anything about what you were seeing, you would have to augment it with another guide.” Schlep around another guide? How uncool.
Davis, of Cool Cities, says, “We totally believe the experience can’t be 100 per cent complete without the serendipity factor. But if we can get our readers to 90 per cent, they are going to have a memorable time.” That leaves readers approximately 1.6 hours a day to chat with the barfly on the next stool, nap beneath a 500-year-old maple tree or, if they wish, see the Eiffel Tower.
The Le Cool series has a much better grasp of what travellers really want. Disenchanted by guides featuring identikit minimalist cafés serving tapas-inspired sushi (or vice versa), editorial director Andrew Losowsky launched a guide to his adopted city, Barcelona, in 2006. (More recently, he has introduced guides to Amsterdam, London, Lisbon and Madrid.) Le Cool Barcelona eschews meditations on Gaudí, assuming travellers will have gleaned that info elsewhere. Instead, there are diversions to private libraries where “the door past the plant on the right” leads into a breathtaking atrium, or instructions to charm the old barmaid who occasionally rents out her guest room. “People will mark a couple of things in our book, then put it down and wander around,” says Losowsky.
Le Cool might reference the odd celeb haunt, but it’ll also cover, says Losowsky, “a bar filled with 70 birdcages or a place where hairy men gather. We don’t like to judge what’s cool. We care about what will be fun and memorable. In two years’ time, you can’t go back to the restaurants in Wallpaper because they’ll no longer be hip and new.”
Slaves to cool, I beseech you: the next time you’re in London, watch the changing of the guards, or spend all day at the pub. When in Paris, wear your sweats to supper. Go see that bullfight in Madrid. And when you go to New York, look up! Sure, it might be uncool, but that’s the thing about travelling: there aren’t any neighbours watching.
Ellen Himelfarb is a Canadian journalist living in London.
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