As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was really impressed with our room at the Four Seasons Resort in Whistler (British Columbia, Canada). Not only was the room big, with lots of nice features (e.g. private veranda, two bathrooms, etc.), but like the whole hotel, the interior design and decoration is absolutely first class all the way.

Unlike the gaudy, pretentious, highly ostentatious displays in Las Vegas, or what you might expect from, say, Donald Trump, this place was low-key quality through and through. Las Vegas is what you'd end up with if you had unlimited funds, but limited class and style. This place had quality and style sitting there quietly waiting to be discovered in every little nook and cranny.

A good example of the attention to detail and the through-and-through class of the hotel design can be seen in the doors to the walk-in closet of our suite. The closet is seen only when walking by from the bedroom to the bedroom's bath suite, so it'd be perfectly acceptable to not have doors, and if you're going to put doors, pretty much anything would do. But “acceptable” and “anything” weren't the bar for this place....

Each of the double doors of the walk-in closet were heavy one-and-a-half-inch thick solid wood, with an inlaid panel surrounded by several levels of delicate moulding. They were certainly heinously expensive, but they didn't scream “expensive” because “expensive” wasn't the point of the design, only a byproduct. I wish I would have gotten a picture of the door detail.

Whistler is in the middle of the mountains, and known for skiing in the winter and all kinds of outdoor activities in the summer. (The skiing and luge events for the 2010 Winter Olympics will be held here; in the summer, downhill mountain biking is popular, but we restricted ourselves to fairly level terrain.)

As such, there's wood everywhere in the interior design. The first picture of this post shows the wood detail of the hotel's front desk, which can also be seen behind Fumie in the lobby photo above.

In the photo above you can see a bunch of interwoven twigs/branches used to separate the lobby from some stairs going down to a lower level. It all fits in so well that you might not even notice, but it's a delight when you do.

It's even more delightful when you go up to them to see how they get them to hold together, and realize that it's actually bronze or the like...

The lower level of the stairs have them as well. Here's looking across a short hallway to the side of the mini in-hotel art gallery...

There was art everywhere, and it was all wonderful, first-class stuff that fit perfectly into its environment. I don't normally notice art, but the pieces in the room and in the public areas (and in the art gallery) were exceptional.

The gallery's centerpiece, a painting of a ballerina by Alexander Sheversky is head-turning stunning. My horrible photo below through the gallery doors just doesn't do it justice.

Of course, the price is head-turning stunning as well: $40,000 Canadian.

There was one piece that Fumie really liked for our entrance way at home, a tall and thin wax and oil piece by Susan Wallis, that – at only $4,000 – was almost free by comparison. The price seemed a bit more expensive, though, when compared to the real world of our wallet, so we passed. I see now, a few days later, that it's been sold.

It's a very nice hotel, but none of this comes cheap. Our bill for the two nights ended up being a bone-jarring US$1,300, so (to put it mildly), I don't think we'll really be able to make this a regular trip.