Hotels books has an unconventional CV. Herbert Ypma was brought up on three continents, dropped out of college to become a professional windsurfer, and founded and edited an interior design magazine, despite having absolutely no formal qualification in either interior design or magazines. Then, 15 years ago, he came up with the idea for Hip Hotels (the Hip stands for Highly India.
It is, to say the least, an unorthodox career. The first Hip Hotels book was published in 1999. Since then, they have become people who like to tick off the hotels as they visit, and middle-aged couples trying to shake up their holiday routine.
Ypma rsquo;s big idea was to group hotels by genre, not necessarily location, as well as to seek out the unusual. Hip Hotels, he reckoned, were travel experiences you could stay in. ldquo;They didn rsquo;t get it, rdquo; he says, over a Guinness in his local.
ldquo;They rsquo;d say, lsquo;Is it a coffee-table book or a guide book? You can rsquo;t be both. You do a book on San Francisco and people who are going to San Francisco buy it.
You can rsquo;t do a book on a bunch of hotels all over the world. rdquo; Ypma rsquo;s gut instinct was that you could. He was right: the 14 Hip Hotels books and cover everything from Hip Hotels Beach to Ski, Budget and Spa.
He takes all the photographs and writes the copy longhand, with a fountain pen, in a Smythson notebook. Hip Hotels UK, the usual beguiling mix of glossy photos and chatty prose, will be added to the list in May. He says there are plenty more in the pipeline ndash; for a start, he hasn rsquo;t got round to doing Russia or As to why he rsquo;s only just got round to doing the UK, where he lives part of the time, Ypma says it rsquo;s because only recently has it become a viable subject.
were Highly Individual Places, but now there are enough to fill a book. rdquo; Having driven 6,000 miles in six weeks to put it together, Ypma came to the as the Star Inn at Harome in North Yorkshire, and what he calls the ldquo;groovy grands rdquo;: old, formal country houses like Cowley Manor, or Moccas Court, which have chucked out the chintz and been given a modern, super-comfortable looks fantastic. You can take the view of the countryside and the sloshing a kitchen that serves breakfast till 5pm.
rdquo; (Ypma rsquo;s personal favourites are the in Devon, in the Scilly Isles, Cowley Manor and Babington.) UK hotels, he says, have changed ldquo;hugely rdquo;, with the biggest change in the countryside, where the market is buoyant, he believes, partly because of London rsquo;s strength as a global financial centre, but also because of the avoided. (He also credits global warming with improving British weather to fair chance of not being rained on.
) ldquo;All of a sudden, possibly led by the example of Babington, people have gone, lsquo;Hey, these Georgian boxes with their stables and outbuildings make really great hotels. rsquo; rdquo; different. ldquo;Only in the UK can you find Georgian country houses that have been converted spectacularly into hotels, rdquo; he says.
ldquo;The same applies to the open fires is a very English idea. rdquo; individual places. ldquo;I don rsquo;t care whether it rsquo;s the location or the design, or that the owners are crazy, or that it rsquo;s in a wacky place.
The point is, that rsquo;s what travel is: it leaves you with stories. rdquo; Hotels like this, he reckons, cater for a new breed of customer: someone who isn rsquo;t interested in spending a weekend in the country hunting, shooting and fishing, but who is interested in having a flat-screen TV in the bathroom, a bed the size of Cheshire and someone else to cook dinner. To those who say that some hotels in the UK book aren rsquo;t exactly unheard of ndash; Babington House, people have been there before him, what matters is his unique take.
Life for Ypma, a youthful blond 49-year-old in a blue shirt with frayed cuffs, looks uncannily like one long holiday. The reality is a punishing schedule of six months a year on the road, on his own, in a different hotel every night. He travels in two or three week chunks and, fortunately, is happy himself, a room service burger and a DVD.
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