Hotel Vendome - A Novel

Informationen zum Autor Danielle Steel  has been hailed as one of the world’s most popular authors! with over 650 million copies of her novels sold. Her many international bestsellers include  Country! Prodigal Son! Pegasus!   A Perfect Life! Power Play! Winners! First Sight! Until the End of Time! The Sins of the Mother!  and other highly acclaimed novels. She is also the author of  His Bright Light!  the story of her son Nick Traina’s life and death;  A Gift of Hope!  a memoir of her work with the homeless;  Pure Joy!  about the dogs she and her family have loved; and the children’s book  Pretty Minnie in Paris. Klappentext Steel's dazzling new novel invites readers into the ultra-glamorous world of a five-star New York hotel and brings to vivid life the man who builds it as his dream! the girl who grows up in its loving embrace! and the colorful guests and staff who make its magic complete. Welcome to the Hotel Vendome. 336 pp. (Romance) Chapter 1 The scene in the lobby of the Hotel Vendôme on East 69th Street in New York was one of impeccable elegance and meticulous precision. The black-and-white-checked-marble floors were immaculate, red runners were rolled out the instant there was a drop of rain outside, the moldings on the walls were exquisite, and the enormous crystal chandelier that hung in the lobby was reminiscent of the finest palaces in Europe. The hotel was much smaller than the one that had inspired its decor, but for practiced travelers, it was remarkably similar to the Ritz in Paris, where the Hotel Vendôme's owner had worked as an assistant manager for two years, during his training in the finest hotels in Europe. Hugues Martin was forty years old, a graduate of the illustrious and respected École Hôtelière de Lausanne in Switzerland, and the hotel on Manhattan's Upper East Side was his dream. He still couldn't believe how lucky he had been, how perfectly it had all come together five years before. His Swiss banker father and equally conservative mother had been devastated when he announced that he wanted to go to hotel school. He came from a family of bankers, and they thought that running a hotel, or working in one, had a seamy quality to it, of which they strongly disapproved. They had done everything they could to talk him out of it, to no avail. After four years at the school in Lausanne, he trained and eventually had respected positions at the Hotel du Cap in Cap d'Antibes, the Ritz in Paris, and Claridge's in London, and even did a brief stint at the famed Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong. He figured out during that time that if he ever had his own hotel, he wanted it to be somewhere in the States. Hugues worked at the Plaza in New York before it closed for extensive renovations, and he assumed that he was still light-years away from his dream. Then it happened. The Hotel Mulberry was put up for sale, a small tired hotel that had been run-down for years and had never been considered chic, despite its perfect location. When he heard about it, Hugues put together every penny of his savings, took out every loan he could get in both New York and Switzerland, and used all of the modest inheritance his parents had left him, which he had carefully put aside and invested. And the combination made the purchase of the hotel possible. He just managed to do it, with a mortgage on the building. And suddenly Hugues was able to buy the Mulberry and do the necessary renovations, which took two years, and at the end of it the Hotel Vendôme was born, to the amazement of New Yorkers, most of whom said they had never even realized that there was a hotel in that location. The building had been a small private hospital in the 1920s and was turned into a hotel in the 1940s, with abysmally bad decor. In contrast, in its transformed state, every inch of the Vendôme was magnificent, and the service was superb. Hu...

Product details

• Authors: Danielle Steel, Danielle Steel
• Publisher: Random House USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 01.11.2011
• EAN: 9780385343176
• ISBN: 978-0-385-34317-6
• No. of pages: 336
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; FICTION / Romance / Contemporary, Adult & contemporary romance, contemporary romance, Fiction: general & literary