The third movement of Jacques Tati’s seminal Playtime [1967] hones in on an immaculate, newly furnished Parisian restaurant/bar on the night of its maiden voyage. As this modernist’s paradise slowly overflows with young couples, drunks and American tourists, its gleaming minimalist interior begins to sag beneath the horde’s weight, lighting fixtures blink wildly and partition walls disintegrate. As the hubbub reaches its climax, we realise that nobody really cares about the sharp design – four cocktails in, all humans want is a dance, a flirt and a roof under which to do it.
Our visit to Harcourt Street’s newest establishment, the Dean Hotel, instantly brings this scene to mind. As we ascend to its fifth floor, the chart-music pulse of the Dean’s neighbouring night clubs reverberate through the lift’s walls with womb-like effect (a lift which, in ode to Playtime, doesn’t seem to have quite had its furnishing job finished yet). Sophie’s, carved into the rooftop of the building, is in full swing. Queues of fur-coated diners clamour for seats, cocktail waiters death-tremor their Boston shakers and the Derulo stomp from nearby Coppers is quelled by a Tower of Babel thunder of 12 different languages, all shouting all at once. Sophie’s is like an aquarium, where we are the fish and Dublin’s diminutive skyline is the school tour. Something like vertigo or the overview effect hits us before we can so much as order a drink; we take in the panorama in a flash and retire immediately to the ground-floor bar where we can drink with a more small-town modesty.
On the ground floor, well-intentioned wait staff haven’t quite got the hang of this hosting business yet (this is not a complaint; some confusion over who is responsible for us means we end up with €20 knocked off our bill). All is calmer here. A lone patron sips Guinness in a corner, five women on a Sex And The City-nostalgia buzz crowd around a champagne bucket and a couple sit in armchairs by the window. We take in the neon signs and Conor Harringtons adorning its newly-scraped walls and order rounds of 11 quid cocktails. We soon switch to spirits; the cocktails have about as much taste as the Everleigh Gardens playlist (the Cuban Espresso goes down more like a Maxwell House and Vodka).
Nonetheless, it’s hard to hate a place with a Fuchsia MacAree print hanging in the jacks. The dust is still very much settling on The Dean, so let us judge it more on its intent than on its infancy. It’s no great stretch to characterise The Dean as a hipster hotel. Its €5.5million outlay has been spent on the design trappings of the creative class: a contemporary art collection, some subtly mismatched furniture, Grafton Barber handsoaps, Clement & Pekoe teas, Tower Records collections and two zillion-inch iMacs at the reception desk. Its lobby could pass for the pad of a thirty-something graphic designer with a particularly lofty per diem freelance rate. In the context of the trench battle that the hotel sector is fighting against AirBnB for the war bucks of under-35 tourists, this is a canny move. The Dean aims for the creative zeitgeist of context-specific design, informal formality; tasting menu over à la carte. Much like every other business in the city right now, it aims to exploit the power of local spirit. The Dean Hotel is Brand Dublin incarnate. It is recession values at post-Crash prices. It is, in essence, everything you can expect from 2015.
The Dean Hotel
33 Harcourt Street, Dublin 2
thedean.ie
01-6078110
Words: Daniel Gray / Photos: Evan Buggle
