Hotel Magnolia Santiago

'Your room's available for an early check-in.' There are few sweeter words to hear upon arriving at a hotel after a red-eye flight. Especially the 16-hour, non-stop slog from London to Santiago. I hadn’t managed to slip beyond semi-consciousness for most of the night and (no offence Dr Smith) neither of us is smelling our freshest as we trudge into Hotel Magnolia’s darkly gleaming lobby at 9am. As our hero (formerly known as the receptionist) hands over keycards, he notes that in peak season we wouldn’t have such luck, as all 40 rooms would probably be fully booked; arriving on an autumnal weekday evidently has its advantages.

Any common-or-garden-variety shower and bed would’ve been welcome sights at this point. Hotel Magnolia’s walk-in rainfall shower and super-king-size four-poster, then, are very close to heaven. Uncharacteristically, we don’t even pop open the Chilean sparkling wine that some kind soul left chilling in our junior suite before flopping face-down on the crisp white sheets.

I wake up an hour later with that momentary, groggy, where-am-I feeling. Scandinavia, perhaps? The walls, floors and high ceilings of our pad are all clad in pale eucalyptus wood, creating a stylish yet placeless sort of minimalist decor. What we’ve gained in size by booking a junior suite, we’ve lost a touch of the artistic placemaking that I’d spotted in pictures of lower-category rooms, which have headboards carved with the Andean skyline or native birds.

A mere detail; what I’m more concerned with is the bathroom door. It’s a flimsy, saloon-style glass number. Unsoundproofed. Now, whereas a great many interior-design choices are subjective, surely nobody on Earth wants to hear their beloved’s bowel movements? Indeed, entire newspaper columns have been devoted to this hospitality bugbear. Ever the resourceful husband, though, Dr Smith soon develops a solution for us to keep the romance alive: blasting Barry White on the suite’s Bluetooth speakers whenever nature calls. The honeymoon goes on.

Emerging from our wood-panelled sanctuary — deodorised, caffeinated and compos mentis — we’re able to fully appreciate the architectural feats by which a 1920s neo-gothic townhouse has been converted into a sleek boutique hotel. 'Trippy,' I murmur, stepping onto the suspended glass walkway that leads from our bedroom door to the equally transparent landing. 'It’s quite sci-fi,' offers Dr Smith. Leaning over the side, we figure out that this modern tower’s been neatly slotted into the original building’s atrium, Russian-doll-style.

Down on terra firma, textbook art deco glamour takes over, with checkerboard floors, potted palms, gilded artworks and a spiralling marble staircase. Looking back at the hotel from across the street, things shift again: its crenelated stonework, stained-glass windows and portcullis-style iron gates are giving Oxbridge college. Such aesthetic step changes could seem jarring but, as we soon find out, they reflect a city where colonial mansions and ‘Sanhattan’s’ ultra-modern skyscrapers hunker down together beside the Andes.

There are arguably two types of cities in the world: those you long to visit and those you pass through en route to other adventures. For many travellers, including Dr Smith and I, Santiago (perhaps unfairly) fell into the latter camp — this is our pre-Patagonia layover. We’d even initially considered booking into a soulless airport crashpad. But then we’d realised it was only a 30-minute taxi ride from arrivals to Hotel Magnolia’s doorstep in El Centro, and with a whole 24 hours before our domestic flight, we thought we'd spend it somewhere with a vibe.

An autumnal amble up Santa Lucía Hill, munching piping-hot empanadas from a hole-in-the-wall bakery, marvelling at Mapuche totems and the world’s oldest mummies in the Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art — the day whistles by fast. Especially when we keep pausing to photograph Santiago’s kaleidoscopic street art.

Before we know it, we’re speedwalking back to Hotel Magnolia’s roof terrace in a race against the rapidly setting sun. Well, the flaming orb may have beaten us to it, but instead of panoramic sunset Pisco Sours, we’re right on time for a free wine-tasting in the cellar downstairs, cluing up on the difference between Chilean cab sav and carménère.

All the sampling must have affected my powers of observation (or perhaps it’s just the jet lag creeping back in), but when we head back upstairs to Terraza Magnolia for an alfresco dinner, I devour an entire plate of salmon ceviche before realising that we’re sitting on a glass floor. It’s always a badge of honour for a hotel to have the kind of bar that locals actually visit and this one is chock-a-block with stylish Santiagans. They seem less afflicted by vertigo than I am, gliding across the glass in heels, in stark contrast to my decidedly wobbly exit.

'Digestif in the library?' suggests Dr Smith, after a shared portion of mate and mandarin crème brûlée. I hesitate — that vast expanse of comfy bed is calling to me — but then he adds the magic words: 'I heard there’s a martini cart...'

This turns out to be a bottle of vermouth for sipping over ice rather than the full kit for whipping up 007’s go-to cocktail, but the moodily lit nook, just off the main lobby, certainly seems like somewhere a tuxedo'd Sean Connery wouldn’t look out of place, reclining on one of the mid-century leather armchairs. The reading material is varied, from vintage cookbooks to tomes on Chinese politics, and charmingly there’s a cabinet of books by authors who’ve stayed at the hotel over the past decade.

'Shame we have to leave first thing, eh?' sighs Dr Smith, who’s just opened a dog-eared copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and looks very much at home. Clearly he’s forgotten he was the one advocating for a ‘convenient’ airport hotel before. But this is one layover that has left us both wanting to linger.