Ritz Carlton, Marina Del Rey

Once again, my Treo fails me. Its photographic output is so lame you can't get the true impact of the upstairs halls of the Ritz Carlton, Marina Del Rey. They are yellow. Really yellow. So yellow, they would make you go back into your room to rest your eyes if you happened to wake up with a tremendous hangover and left your chamber to saunter downstairs for a cup of coffee and a croissant. They're yellow. Nice carpet pattern, though. Interlocking rings of blue. Nautically-themed prints on the walls.

Downstairs, things are more subdued. Browner hues prevail. The nautical theme continues, but leaps back a century or two. Where the upstairs halls' wall decorations are modern photography (mostly of water & reflections), this downstairs features (you can just make it out on the right) a model of a late 18th or early 19th Century US Navy Frigate (of no great renown). Look, I have nothing against nautical themes, and this hotel is right on the Marina of the eponymous Del Rey, so there's some justification for them. But this hotel was clearly built in the last decades of the 20th century, so why try to overlay it with phony history? The Ritz-Carlton is a lovely chain of hotels, and doesn't need Disneyfying. Nevertheless, I think it's beginning to stumble a bit. The people that work at the hotel were, to a person charming and welcoming. The idiotically-named restaurant, the "Jer-Ne", (Get it, nudge nudge?) is really good, the location is handy, the head valet parking guy wears a top hat, (poor man), etc., but here's the thing. My sink was cracked, the drain in said sink was 3/4 clogged, the shower head flopped around and refused to aim anywhere but straight up and down - which I could have fixed, had I only had a screwdriver with me - and there was a dodgy looking stain on the carpet at the foot of my bed. But hey! That yellow hall upstairs perked me right up.

Addendum: Lovely photos from Davezilla that better show off the decor. (Those are the actual feet of Davezilla himself!)