jkas292
July 12, 2024
First the good news: Manoir Hovey is a nice hotel in a really lovely place. The grounds and gardens are gorgeous, and the new spa is wonderful. Service was attentive if a little unpolished at times. We had a memorably good dinner at Le Hatley, and the wine list there (from which we ordered an excellent 1er cru white burgundy that we had been hoping to try) suggested a really thoughtful, expansive cellar. Alas, we ended up with what must be the single least updated accommodation in the entire hotel: Room 1. We booked late, and reserved the lowest class of room, so I wasn't expecting grand luxury, but I'd be shocked if there is another room in the hotel as uniformly unimproved as ours was. Among its notable features: A bathroom so small you literally could hardly turn around in it, even without a sink, which -- in the manner of a nineteenth-century boarding house -- was instead located in the corner of our small bedroom. Furnishings poised somewhere between period pieces and flea market castoffs: one of the drawer knobs on our "antique" (read worn and chipped) dresser came off in my wife's hand the first time she tried to open it, while our "fireplace" consisted of a plastic heater insert with an image of burning logs that we could turn on and off with a remote, like something from a dollhouse. Massive pipes running obtrusively along each of the walls at the ceiling, presumably for an antiquated sprinkler system. An air vent in the floor that was connected to either 1) the office, 2) the kitchen, 3) the laundry, or 4) all of the above, and which transmitted the sounds and smells of the hotel infrastructure each morning starting around 6am. An old non-functional thermostat control panel on the wall (next to the actual one) that instead of being removed had just been left there with a cruddy label-maker sign taped to it saying "Don't use this one", like something you'd see in a $39/night autoroute motel. I guess we just had the misfortune of staying in the worst room in the "best resort in Canada," but after a day or so, it started to feel as though we had actually stumbled into what was intended as a kind of museum exhibit, so that historically minded visitors could see what the hotel was like back in the olden days, before it got cleaned up and renovated and joined Relais & Chateaux. Outside such a context, however, I'm pretty sure you'll never see any pictures of it on the hotel's very refined, modern website, because it was sort of the antithesis of modern refinement. (See the attached images of our room for comparison sake.) And so we'd strongly caution any prospective guests to triple check they don't draw the same short straw we did and end up spending CAD500+ per night for the forlorn Room 1, and the same odd and rather disappointing experience we had as guests there.