Just Marking your Cards..

Foyer of The Marker Hotel

I managed to hobble to a social media network event on Wednesday, Jeff Matthews from Linkedin was there, he started in Dublin with 6 people in 2006, they now employ 350 here and provide a nifty platform for all sorts of professions and industries. I still haven't changed my profile on Linkedin or announced the impending novel publication. I'm prevaricating between self publishing or the traditional route. The former yields more return per copy and more choice in book cover. It's tempting. I'm especially encouraged by Her Vanessaness of Writing.ie with whom I now seem to be on a committee, having inadvertently been assigned the role of membership secretary at |rish Pen. 

Exchanging business cards at the event, I handed one to a recruitment consultant. He took one look at mine and inclined his head pityingly, ‘not much call for architectural historians in our business.’ Usually, I’m stuck for words when confronted with tacit rudeness, but just suggested he might like to look beyond the card at my projects. Next morning, I smiled as I received an email from him, exclaiming his feelings of inadequacy. I suppose we can all open our mouths and but several feet in them at times.

After the Business Network event, my dapper friend Leigh and I went to The Marker, Dublin's newest hotel, designed by the Portuguese practice of Manuel Aires Mateus and realised by Irish architects MDO. The facade has been finished for three years, a giant checkerboard affair, which only begins to make sense when you enter the ground floor space. Inside, the ceiling undercroft is a sculptural plateau of geometric planes, described by the attentive waiter as 'inspired by the limestone landscape of the Burren.'  Similarly, the exterior is the portuguese architect's impression of the Giant's Causeway.  

The interior is chic, with a sublime nocturnal vista of the Martha Schwartz neon garden, one of the more inspired Tiger legacies. The hotel employs some charming Irish staff, serving top class cocktails. We were spoiled by the entire experience; we could have been in New York.

So there, the story of a truly Irish hotel, the developer and builder go bust, becomes a ghost hotel, looked like it might be consigned to the heap of unfinished monuments to the Celtic Tiger, rescued for a song by an American group, salvaged and styled into a stunning new venue. Just in time for the nearby audience of The Full Monty to descend on the cocktail bar and, well, sort of remind us we were down the docks.