Stamba Hotel

Put it on my tombstone: the world would be a better place if the world was like Tbilisi airport. In fact, if the world were like Tbilisi, but let’s start with customs. 

It’s past 2am, and at a risk of being too flattering to ourselves, Mrs Smith and I look like extras from The Walking Dead. Still, instead of the icy interrogation seemingly obligatory in the rest of the world, we receive the warmest of hellos, and then – drum roll – the customs officer brings out two mini bottles of wine. Wine. We look up. There are boxes stacked behind her; wine for everyone who comes through. Welcome to Georgia, she says, and she waves us in.

It is astounding the chemical reaction of complimentary wine at a border. You don’t even need to open it to feel the effect. We are euphoric. Mrs Smith keeps squeezing my hand. All this could sound a little twee. But it isn’t. TL;DR: over the course of two days, I text several friends this thoughtful and considered summary: Tbilisi is really fucking cool. 

And nowhere is the intersection of oven-hot Georgian generosity and ice-cool Georgian style more present than in Hotel Stamba, an extraordinary feat of scale and imagination housed in the skeleton of a former Soviet publishing house, on Tbilisi’s Kostava Street. 

We enter under exposed bulbs that bring to mind a starlet’s mirror. They call it an atrium but that word doesn’t come close: a six-story criss-cross of mammoth exposed concrete beams, with exotic greenery and sky-touching trees growing up from the basement. Instead of walls, bookshelves to a scale that makes one think the hotel might be single-handedly keeping the publishing industry alive. And laced through the concrete, high above our heads, are the conveyor belts that once moved communist newspapers through the various stages of printing.
 
A bellboy in a ruby-red uniform escorts us to our room. When we get there, I attempt to film the reaction shot on my phone. One, this is horrifically cheesy, like some kind of ill-fated gender reveal. Two, it was pointless: for the whole 60 seconds, Mrs Smith was entirely speechless. 

Sometimes, the ability to speak just flies like a bird out the window. It helps if that window runs the full corner-to-corner of one wall, is surrounded by exposed brick, and looks out at a neon-lit radio tower in the courtyard. The ceiling height is 3-4 Mrs Smiths. There are chandeliers made of polished horn.  Sitting atop red enamel tiles is a freestanding brass bateau bath, and beyond it, ‘La Cage’: an 8ft-tall wraparound shower inspired by a 19th-century French original. Two hundred jets come at you from every angle. There’s a mini-bar and a maxi bar, a DIY mixology corner decked out with full-size bottles. There’s a bed big enough to pitch a marquee on, and something I didn’t know I loved until precisely that moment: foot-kissing milk-white carpets. 

At its best, a hotel feels like something a home could never be – beyond, better. Details so decadent you almost want to laugh. This is that. Chocolates made in-house from cocoa-bean trees in Kakheti wait like Class-A drugs on an antique mirror coffee table. Bath salts call our name from a huge glass apothecary jar. A baby blue mini Marzocco espresso maker and house-roasted beans sit on a wooden countertop,  and an accidental M theme emerges, with Margiela toiletries (and mini Marvis for your teeth) and a speaker system by cult audiophiles McIntosh. 

Another thing that doesn’t always happen in hotels: you feel like you could pass away a day in the room happily. A year even. Don’t, though. In this case, it’s worth slipping out into the world. Tbilisi thrums with a mix-n-match of every kind of cool. Art nouveau sidles into Sputnik-esque TV towers, and grapevines hang through gardens instead of washing. Taxis smell of jasmine, verandas in the old town feel like they’re asking for your hand in marriage, and at Dry Bridge market, fresh-pomegranate-juice stalls fuel your treasure hunt through walls of hand-woven rugs, dusty chandeliers and Soviet tchotchkes. 

And that’s before you’ve even had a bite to eat. Georgian food is call-your-work-and-tell-them-you’re-never-coming-home superb: herbaceous, cheese-laden, hyper-savoury, tangy sweet. And there’s nowhere better to sample its delights than at the hotel’s very own Cafe Stamba, a Wes Anderson-meets-Mondrian darling of Tbilisi’s fashion and art kids, replete with Vetements wardrobes and facial tattoos.  

Stamba plays its hand as cool as these kids play theirs. In a way – a great way – it’s like someone mysterious on a first date. It won’t just blurt everything out, so ask it questions, test its limits. Walk the marathon to the hidden depths of the lobby bar. Work out that Cafe Stamba also houses a secret Ramen bar and a wunderkammer wine shop. Follow the glow to the vertical farm, home to edible flowers, Swiss chard, kale, berries and lit up like a nightclub for plants. Walk through the music-video-ready underground carpark to visit Stamba’s conjoined sister hotel Rooms, which is lit low enough to make it feel like you’re having an affair even if you’re sitting opposite your own partner.

Apologies to Mrs Smith, but it was actually back home at Stamba’s chandelier-crowned Pink Bar that I really fell in love. With a cocktail so mesmerising I had an ocean of it: the Black Sea. Bourbon, mezcal, corn-infused agave, lime, salt water. On the last night, I agreed to open things up. We brought two back home upstairs to our golden bathtub. We walked incredibly slowly because we didn’t want to spill a drop. We walked incredibly slowly because in some way we felt we might trick the space-time continuum and not have to leave. The next morning as the nose of our plane lifted off the runway, it turned out physics still applied to us; we’d just have to do everything in our physical power to go back.