The Luxe Manor

Though the name may give pause, rest assured, they know exactly how over-the-top it is, and it’s meant to be delivered with a wink. The Luxe Manor is, on one level at least, a satire on the ever-escalating absurdities of the high-end luxury hotel market, complete with painted-on chandeliers, trompe l’oeil fireplaces, cartoonish mock antiques and a staggering volume of gold paint.

Of course you can’t run a hotel on cleverness alone; on a more fundamental level, it’s got to work as a hotel. In this case it’s one of Kowloon’s very few design boutiques, the kind of place that in less ambitious hands would be all monochrome minimalism, and the crazy riot of ornament just lends personality, one quality (along with things like service, which in the Luxe’s case is solid, and location, ditto) by which these sorts of hotels live and die.

And for all its lampooning of the ostentatious high end, Luxe Manor has a few genuine luxuries of its own. Each room comes with a smartphone, with unlimited calls and 3G data included in the room rate. Those LCD televisions aren’t any less functional for the fact that they’re encased in fake-gold picture frames, and it’s a fact that’s at once hilarious and impressive that the Italian restaurant is helmed by a Michelin-starred chef who used to cook on one of the Onassis yachts. In the end it’s perhaps the best of both worlds, a case of having your cake and chuckling at it too.