wake up your windows
on the immense joy of open windows
Architecture and design can show the subconsciousness of a time period, the tide marks of genre. It is mostly subtle, although sometimes isn’t, but little things can tell you particular ideas and beliefs that have become popular in the minds of a group of people who build things. Public seating that is designed not to be comfortable for too long for fear of sleeping and homelessness by city planners. Cathedrals with flying archways designed to make one feel small and scared in the footsteps of the houses of a large worshiped god. Cities designed to be workable and usable only by car, no sidewalks, no crosswalks. A language is born when one puts their mind to the messages left through the designs of landscape. Marks are left.
For my lifetime, I have seen one of these effects morph and meld and I find myself in disagreement with it, pushing against it; hotels with windows that can’t be opened. I love a window that can open as it allows for connection to the outside. Being sealed into a hermetic space, to me, feels controlled and desperate. I want, at least the illusion, that I can interact freely with the place I am in. There are cases where this is not possible, the higher floors of a sky scrapper, or in a place where the environment is extreme, but for all others it is a real window that I look for. There are hotels I remember because of this, like some angsty teen keen on the illusion of rebellion, I celebrate tossing open the window of my hotel room and looking out on some street or landscape and feeling the breeze roll in, full, with scent from the surroundings, it is a connection to place. There are hotels where even the smell is controlled through designed perfumes and duct systems. For me, this is a level of controlled artificiality that only should be allowed in theme parks. Have the confidence in both myself and the place you have built your hotel to know that I can handle uncontrolled experiences and still enjoy it, that spontaneity and chaos, sometimes, often, is just what the doctor ordered. Here are a few of my favorite hotel windows:
The great valley that has Mount Everest as its northern terminus is called Solukhumbo. In the southern part of this valley there is a town called Phaplu. It is the old approach trail the climbers would use to get to the big peaks, also the region the Sherpa people came to from Tibet in the 16th century. It is evergreen, lush thick side valleys and religious zones, thus into beyul (a term used to describe a utopia of sorts). Here is the home of the Happy House, a place that prioritizes long minutes and slower time. It is a home, not a hotel, but it houses travelers and is very special. It is palatial but not a palace, approachable and warm and comforting. It is a chalet and allows for long afternoons spent outside, with a book or a gin, it is like a worn leather chesterfield, perfectly portioned. The place was built by Ang Tawa Lama, the grandson of the founder of the village, and the italian climber Count Guido Monzino in the 1970’s. It housed Edmund Hillary and family when he was organizing the Himalayan Trust, and is owned and run by my friend Ang Tshering Lama, grandson of Ang Tawa Lama. The windows wake up wide in this house and the breeze one can harness on the back side of the house comes from the ice flows off the grand Himalaya. It is full and deep and mixed with juniper and pine. The view out the back through my window is the photo below:
Related to the Happy House in Nepal by its patron Christopher Franz-Gierke, the Genghis Khan Retreat is a summer place in Mongolia, seasonal.
About 370km west of UB is a river and a valley that was and is very special to both Mongolia and the Eurasian landmass, the Orkhon valley. It was in this valley, and on the Orkhon river, that Genghis Khan decided to build his capital city, ruling from the Danube to the Pacific, the largest kingdom the world had known. The choice of this particular valley was strategic. It was central and accessible to central asia and the cities of Samarkand and Bukhara, as well as Tibet to the south, China to the south east, Siberia to the north. Genghis Khan wasn’t the wise one to pick it as it had been a capital many times before in the past. Prior to Genghis Khan it was the valley chosen to be the capital of the Turkic empire, the original Turks who now have settled in the Anatolian peninsula. The Turks, the culture, the language, the people came from this region prior to being pushed out by the Mongols and their khans. This valley was also the capital of the Uyghur empire and the home of that culture, language, and people before being pushed down to the Xinjiang region. Prior to the Turks and the Uyghurs, it was the capital city for the Huns, who pushed the Goths into western roman empire and thus began the fall of that epoch in European history. Prior to all of these histories, this valley was, and is, riddled with auspicious standing stones of the time and style of Stone Henge, and even have Celtic style iconography in some of the carvings. It is a valley that has known human history, a part of human history mostly misrepresented by Eurocentric viewpoints, but is just now beginning to have light shone on it.
Christopher Giercke was a film producer who worked with Francis Ford Coppola on Apocalypse Now (1979), and Cocaine Cowboys (1979) featuring Andy Warhol. He managed the New York Dolls and Johnny Thunder, he lived an examined life. While working on a film in Mongolia, he met Enkhtsetseg “Enkhe” Sanjaardorj who had grown up near this valley. They fell in love and started a family and for a number of years now have been returning to this place like migratory birds, summer months spent playing in the grass and the steppe. Through the years they would invite friends to come and spend time, write, and breath poetically. This became what the retreat is now, it grew and shifted and still is. Now run by his son D'artagnan, it is a place I return to as well, am drawn to.
Christopher is obsessed with Polo and bringing the sport back to Mongolia, a country that has a natural love of the horse built into the landscape. It was the Mongolian horse that allowed Genghis Khan to rule the world, it is the horse that is married to the human here that allows for survival in the harsh long winters, and it is the horse that is the basis for the national sport of racing, a natural fit for the sport born not to far away in Iran, a place connected to Mongolia through the Turk, Han, and Uyghur history. This camp attracts the world’s best polo players to come and train, it is wild and unconnected to the private clubs of other places, it is like golf is to St Andrews.
The retreat is a series of Ger’s (yurts) that are set up in June and taken down in September. There is a large Ger that houses piano’s and tables for long summer dinners. Concert pianists, like Odgerel Sampilnorov, come and spend time here and play in the evenings. It is like living in a novel.
There is a small plant that grows in the grasslands that in the summer fills the air with an herbaceous glow. When at the camp, there are no windows in the Ger’s, but there is a large door that is often left open, and the sides of the Ger can be rolled up to create an under-lighting breeze that fills the Ger with the wild mint and chamomile scent. It is a feeling that is lodged in my hippocampus somewhere and I think on those last few minutes of life will be one of the many memories of my life that will flash before me.
A view from the Ger:
Another sacred valley, this one called Phobjikha. At 10,000 feet, it is a sanctuary for the Black neck crane, a medium-sized crane in Asia that breeds on the Tibetan Plateau but nests in this particular valley on the south side of the mountain chain in the Kingdom of Bhutan. Bhutan’s name is thought to be from the sanskrit word Bhotant, “the end of Tibet”. As you enter the valley there is a village, Gangtey where a large monastery sits like a fortress looking out to this high altitude place. Next to the monastery is place called the Gangtey Lodge, a hotel owned by a couple I had met years ago in Myanmar/Burma when I lived and worked as a guide there, Khin Omar Win & Brett Melzer. It is of no surprise that one of their businesses in the past was hot air balloon rides in the ancient city of Bagan. It is of no surprise because they know what the world looks like from the heights, and how to position a view. The Gangtey Lodge hangs in the air above the valley and from your room one can open the windows and feel the wind rolling through the valley in the comforts of warm waters, as they designed the tub to be front and center to the open windows.
Mersault, France, Central Ville
There was a hotel in the center of Mersault in France that I spent a week in one summer ages ago. It is no longer there, the building is but it is no longer a hotel. It was of the 1950’s in style and feel, a creaky radiator, two taps in the sink for hot and cold, a single 40 watt light hanging from the center ceiling, and a bed that was metal springs, sagging like the back of an old horse. Everything in the room felt heavy and worn, but there was a large window that in memory started near my waist and went to the 12 foot ceiling top, and when you would open it in the morning would blast the room with light and vision and transform the drabness instantly into the perfection that is a French summer in Burgundy.
I have written about this hotel a number of times, as it provided a home for me for a number of years living and working in Myanmar before things changed, before the country fell apart. From my room I could open the windows and doors out onto a mid-century modern patio and a view of the old Schwedagon pagoda booming above the trees a few miles away, a golden dome like a setting sun. I could look out and see the Inya Lake and Aung San Suu Kyi’s house across the waters, the birds and life that filled the city of Yangon, and the religious smoke from so many offerings in the streets below. I smoked cigarettes then and would drink a coffee in the morning with burning tobacco and incense fumes wafting about me, and the humid mornings of this part of Asia a bustle.
Desmond Tutu Center NYC (now the High Line Hotel)
My in-laws before they were in-laws stayed here visiting my wife and I when we lived in NYC and we spent a weekend playing in Chelsea, dining, seeing shows, and walking the High Line. The rooms were spacious and had fireplaces and windows that would open out onto a garden, and the place and space had depth and patina. It is now the High Line Hotel and I imagine it still has this feel, and I know it still has the windows that open as I have called a few times since then to check. It was Clement C. Moore’s apple orchard hundreds of years ago, it is where “T’was the Night Before Christmas” was written, and it became a seminary, a cathedral, a gathering place. It was of no surprise that a famed story of sprits carried by the wind would be told, the breeze off of the Hudson river can be felt and the vibrations of lived spaces in these religious halls known. I love being in a city like New York yet having the feel of a full deep breeze and the option of a fireplace, it feels right, correct, at ease and unbiased by the large city it occupies. We will return soon and will stay again, maybe this time with our family in tow so our children can feel this New York rather than the one formed by large chain hotels with windows sealed shut.
