austin heath

Review of The Gresham Hotel

Aesthetically the building seems of a more refined...

Aesthetically the building seems of a more refined ilk, but it should only take one evening to see that this is just an average hotel. When we arrived and parked in the garage, we had to wander around and find the parking attendant because YOU CAN'T GET TO THE HOTEL FROM THE PARKING GARAGE UNLESS YOU HAVE A ROOM KEY. Which means when checking in, you have to find the attendant. Then we got lost in the hotel because the parking garage opens into a random place of the hotel and you have to take a separate set of elevators in order to even get to the lobby to check in. No bell service or baggage carts provided, so pack lightly as it is a 3-4 minute walk. The room was clean on arrival. There are only two outlets in the rooms, and none in the bathroom (my girlfriend couldn't use her hair accessories in front of a mirror.) And if you have more than two devices, you'll need to be patient and take turns charging them. The beds had a top sheet tucked all the way around into the bed because they don't actually provide a top sheet or a real bottom one for that matter; just a big extremely comfy comforter. The bathroom was a joke though. It is a bathtub with a shower head but no curtain to protect the rest of the room from water. Instead they have a half length swinging door that is maybe 2 by 3 feet large, is not water sealed, and swings either direction you push. Meaning, if you're tall like myself (6'6) it is literally impossible to take a shower because all the water bounces off of you and onto the bathroom floor. It was also extremely slippery and a very large step from out of the tub down to the floor. Elderly will struggle with getting in and out. There is also no bathroom fan so things become wet and foggy very quickly (it was raining the whole time we were there so we couldn't open the window.) Finally, from around 9-2am that night, the sink wouldn't give me any cold water. The cold water was warmer than luke warm, and we let it run for almost 5 minutes on 3 separate occasions. The hot water was scolding hot and had no variance in temperature. Not sure what that was all about as the next morning it seemed to work correctly. Basically, we were constantly surprised by the small inconveniences (no top sheet or cold water???) we kept encountering and after 2 days of them, it was hard to be positive about what The Gresham is doing: banking off their historic look and feel and charging accordingly, while actually not trying to bring the amenities into the 21st century.