Side Order: Hotel From Home

27 items you’ll need to fake a vacation

For the last several weeks I’ve been overwhelmingly jealous of anyone posting vacation photos from a Greek island or an Italian beach. I’m not typically a jealous person, but here I am, wistfully looking at pictures of striped beach club umbrellas and poolside cocktails with envy in my heart. I prefer to travel in the fall when it’s both cheaper and cooler, but still… I’d do anything to be sweating my face off on a jam-packed cobblestone street right now.

Audrey Hepburn in France, Terry O’Neill, 1966

Something I love about staying in a hotel (well, a good one) is that it’s hard for thoughts about anything responsible to creep in when you’re in a place engineered to make you temporarily forget about real life. They do this by distracting you with every little detail, the more excessive the better, from custom plates in the dining room to branded tissue-wrapped toilet paper rolls in the bathroom. I stayed a mere 19 miles from my house at Sunset Tower Hotel for a night last month and had the time of my life eating french fries by the pool and sipping cocktails in the lobby bar, not a care in the world about anything beyond the hotel perimeter. I even bought a Sunset Tower hat to commemorate the experience of briefly escaping my to-do list in favor of 24 hours of rest and relaxation. I should do this once a month! I thought to myself as I drove back to my apartment, a dream quickly squashed once the bill for the night made its way into my inbox.

(By the way, in preparation for this newsletter I asked you all in the group chat what hotels make the best merch and you guys PULLED THROUGH. Click the button below to see everyone’s answers.)

Room Service, Andy Warhol, 1980

I think it’s worth it to try and access a vacation state of mind as often as I can, even if it’s from my own sofa. A lot of you who work from home can probably relate to the blurriness between time and space for work versus for not-work, and sometimes it takes me literally putting my laptop in a drawer, flipping my office back into the dining room it was intended to be, and removing anything work-related from view to transition into a state of leisure. I try to be intentional about taking time to orchestrate these moments, whether I’m Doordashing food from my favorite restaurant and pretending it’s room service (plate it nicely and put it on a tray; it’ll change your takeaway game) or slipping into freshly washed sheets in my crispiest pajamas to read for a bit before bed. Romanticize your life, as they say.

Jack Nicholson in Cannes, 1974

Below I’ve curated 27 new and vintage little items of luxury, each equipped with the power to turn a weekend at home into a vacation destination, even if just for a moment.