Award: Greatest Range of Luxury Levels in Under 500 Square Feet
Written: Aug 28 '03 (Updated Aug 29 '03)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Read the review.
Cons: Read the review.
The Bottom Line: Clearly remodeled by a former dollhouse maker. A fine place to stay if you're not very tall. Voices in the kitchen are the sign of a truly "historic" hotel.
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| Urbanist's Full Review: MarQueen Hotel |
If you pull up Downtown Seattle on Priceline, you'll see that their downtown zone extends all the way up the west side of Seattle Center to encompass the Lower Queen Anne district. Lower Queen Anne is not downtown -- it's really its own neighborhood -- but there is one hotel up here that they didn't know how to categorize anywhere else.
MarQueen is a converted brick apartment building. Its lobby (see picture) is nice. Its hallways look like apartment hallways anywhere, with nicer carpet. "Room service" is provided by neighboring businesses. And yes, there's no parking, which is to say: "Welcome to the neighborhood!" Transit to downtown, however, is excellent, and Seattle Center is just two blocks away. The staff is very nice, if slightly bashful in explaining some of the odder features of the establishment.
Since I had booked on Priceline, I got the ground-floor suite with alley-view. To achieve suiteness in a space that can't have been 500 square feet, the remodelers had done a charming exercise in miniaturization. Suites must have a livingroom separate from the bedroom, and sure enough, just inside the door, I found the livingroom on my right. They had carved out a space about eight feet square, and equipped it with a loveseat, two chairs and two tables. Presto! A livingroom. Just be short, as I'm not, and entertain short guests, and you'll find it quite ... cozy, I guess, is the word.
Outside this alcove-cum-livingroom, the rest of the main room is taken up by two beds, a dresser, and a television on a stand. All this is fine two-star fare, but if any of the furniture was especially fine, as the hotel seems to suggest it is, it was impossible to back up far enough to see it without tripping over the bed or the hitting the alcove wall.
A suite must also have a kitchen. Here, finally, the MarQueen achieves a genuine historic touch: the working-class micro-kitchen typical of one-room apartments in the interwar period, all painted white but otherwise lovingly preserved. The "dining nook" (a built-in, like a restaurant booth, with benches and table) was exactly as I remember from living in such places at age 5 -- though at age 5 I was small enough to sit in them. The rest of the micro-kitchen was functional, bright. And the view! From the dining nook I looked directly into the alley, where someone had done some vague and indifferent muraling on the cement wall just beyond. Charming!
If you want to see the greatest range of opulence in the smallest possible space, I recommend the MarQueen. It is a lovely lobby, and the livingroom in your suite does have fine expensive furniture in a "compact" arrangement that ensures you won't have to get out of your chair in order to straighten the tie of your gentleman caller seated across the room. From such a refined space, it's just a few steps to the lovingly-preserved cramped kitchen where you can practically hear the voices of past residents -- perhaps unemployed dockworkers arguing with their wives as children screamed and tripped, or perhaps, more recently, hippie artists living five to a room, discussing Nietzche, Dylan, and applied polyamory. Perhaps these voices hang out in the dustbunnies of the uncleanable dining nook, and bounce off the cement walls of the alley to amplify themselves ...
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
Urbanist
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Location: San Francisco
Reviews written: 78
Trusted by: 72 members
About Me:
Streetwise, academically credentialed gay renaissance man. For real bio, click "more" in profile.
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