Germany - 4
There was just and only just time in Frankfurt for Girlahead to rush over to what was Villa Kennedy and is now Villa Florentin, an Althoff Hotel. Fortunately, the GM, Boris Messmer, a Hanseatic with oodles of experience at Maybourne, including running marvellous Maybourne Riviera for three years, was accommodating enough to delay a trip to London to be there to greet Girlahead.
The image above is taken in the hotel’s Speyer Villa, the 1901 home of banker Eduard Beit von Speyer. The hotel is absolutely unrecognizable. A member of Leading, it was bought in 2021 for a reported 95 million euros. The owners now are identical twins, Andreas and Thomas Stronmann, who, when they were only 36, founded generic drug company Hexal.
The 163-key hotel’s beautiful. The rooms are mostly designed by Singapore-based Unscripted: of its three principals, two came from Kerry Hill and one from Jean-Michel Gathy and Hilton. The fine dining restaurant Dune, which has two Michelin stars, does actually look like dunes – all f&b is the design work of a pair of Swiss girls working as Atelier Zurich – one of the pair, Sabine Herzog, coincidentally was also schooled by Hilton Dune has walls that appear to undulate, and a blue roof twinkling as if starred. It also has an absolutely charming, and obviously brilliantly talented, chef. Nicolas Nussbaumer.
The visit to Villa Florentine was truncated, incidentally, because the bullet-type train scheduled between Berlin and Frankfurt was rushing along at well over 100 k per hour when it stopped, gradually but suddenly, and it was stationary for 90 minutes. Somebody had reported seeing kids on the line. The police were called, the kids found, and then the line minutely checked for anything they may have left behind. But arriving at the station, finally, was as glorious as ever. They're three-dimensional. See the image. And the shopping facilities are always superb.
