|
World Hotels - Wallpaper City Guide: Paris (Wallpaper City Guide Paris)
|
List Price: $8.95
Our Price: $8.95
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Phaidon Press
|
Average Customer Rating:   
|
|
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 914
EAN: 9780714846934
ISBN: 0714846937
Label: Phaidon Press
Manufacturer: Phaidon Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 120
Publication Date: 2006-09-15
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Studio: Phaidon Press
|
|
|
|
|
|
Editorial Reviews:
|
"Wallpaper City Guides" not only suggest where to stay, eat, and drink, but what the tourist passionate about design might want to see, whether he/she has a week or 24 hours in the city. Featured are up and coming areas, landmark buildings in an 'Architour', design centres, and the best shops to buy items unique to that city. "Wallpaper City Guides" present travellers with a fast-track ticket to the chosen location. The edited guides offer the best, most exciting, and the most beautiful of that particular city. As well as looking beautiful, the guides are expertly designed with function as a priority, and have tabbed sections so that the tourist can easily find what they are looking for. There are maps, rate and currency cards, colour-coded parts of the city, and an easy navigational tool. They are the ultimate combination of form and function.
|
|
|
Spotlight customer reviews:
|
Customer Rating:
Summary: Don't waste your Money or Time
Comment: These include a couple of poorly reproduced photos and tiny articles drawn from the magazine, obviously nobody was sent there seperately to do anymore research or come up with any useful information. These are vapid and terrible.
Save your money and get a real guide book, the same places will be included but you might learn something.
Customer Rating:
Summary: so hip it's one revelation after another
Comment: Wallpaper Magazine --- the bible of all that is cutting edge in international design/fashion/travel/interiors --- is celebrating its 10th birthday.
And how better to show off its grown-up status --- at ten, a magazine is old enough to drink and smoke and Lord knows what else --- than by rolling out a slew of travel guides that are exactly as hip as the magazine?
These make no effort to be complete. They're 100+ pages. Paperback. Smallish: 6" by 4". With photos that sometimes fill two pages.
In other words, these are not travel guides for first-time travelers. (You want a primer --- start with a guide like Fodor's.) These books are a whole other game. Indeed, they're so of the moment that they probably need to be junked and massively revised every year or two --- the cutting edge has a way of cutting the throats of hip restaurants and shops. And the thing about architecture is that there's always more of it, and the new stuff is (or so the media would have it) just a bit more exciting than last year's.
To judge these guides, I selected a city I know well (Paris) and the city that's been home for most of my life (New York). Talk about surprising! No, make that mind-blowing.
Wallpaper's Paris Guide doesn't fall for the lie that the city never changes. It sees "constant, if sometimes, gentle, upheaval." Yes --- if you are 25 years old and have spent quantity time haunting the chic arrondissements. If, like me, you have a family and plunk yourself down in the 6th or 7th, this guide is a revelation.
I loved the cheek of this praise of the Marais: "These streets...are as near as Paris gets to signs of life on a Sunday." I was happily surprised to learn that Sacre-Coeur was "built as a monument to failure" (in the Franco-Prussian War). But after that...everything was new. I was especially agog at the hotels --- the photos are so exquisite they're hotel-porn. Who could afford these rooms? Why did I know so few of them?
For that matter, I'd heard of half the restaurants, none of the clubs, few of the buildings. Shopping? Spas? Getaways? Zip. Zip. Zip. It got so that I frowned when I came across a recommendation for a known entity --- like Joel Robuchon's Atelier. Clearly, Joel's super-expensive, no-reservations eatery must be on the way out.
Wallpaper's New York Guide was equally full of surprises. I live uptown --- clearly, everything worth seeing or doing is way downtown. (Though it was bracing to see the Paris Theatre, at 5th Avenue and 58th Street, listed as the city's best art-movie cinema.) I've never heard of the beautiful Matsuri Restaurant (in the Maritime Hotel), or Thor, or Public, or Odea, or En, or Morimoto. And that's just the tip of my iceberg of ignorance.
But here's the thing: Nowhere in these guides do I get the feeling that the writer is sneering at me. Or, that if I go to these places, the proprietors will look at my preppy blazer and graying hair and frantically look for a velvet rope to bar me. The exclusionary factor here is money --- bargains are not a Wallpaper priority.
But, hey, you're on a vacation. A little splurge won't kill you. And if you cherry-pick the suggestions in these guides, you're sure to have an adventure you can share with the folks back home. But you'll have to excuse me now --- I'm off to visit New York
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|