The luxury of attention is the unforced, unwavering attention of one person to another, which has become scarce in a life mediated by screens. It is what the world's best hotels and restaurants actually sell: the experience of being noticed, known and attended to by a team trained to do it well, every day.
The phrase gives the book its title, and it came from watching two things happen at once over the years I spent interviewing hoteliers and chefs. The first was a shift in luxury itself. Experiential luxury displaced transactional luxury, as the trend reports from Skift, McKinsey and CBRE correctly describe. Luxury stopped being about what the guest possessed and became what the guest was spared from having to think about, what was taken care of before they knew to ask. The second shift was quieter and happened everywhere. The surface of daily life filled with screens built to break concentration into smaller and smaller fragments, and the plain attention of one human being to another became, against the run of the whole economy, scarce.
Those two shifts meet in the lobby and at the pass. A guest can still afford a fine room. What they increasingly cannot buy anywhere else is an hour of someone’s undivided attention. The teams in the best hotels and kitchens have been producing exactly that for decades, on purpose, daily. They were practicing the luxury of attention before the phrase had a name, and the world is finally arriving at the recognition that the work was always worth paying for.
It helps to see what the attention looks like when it is executed well, because the phrase can sound abstract and the practice is anything but. Graham Ledger, then general manager of Singita across South Africa, Zimbabwe and Tanzania, described what his team does with the smallest possible data point, a guest’s regular drink order.
“We will add this cocktail to their drink box for their guide to share with them during a game drive, or we may prepare a surprise gin bar during the bush dinner at the boma.” Graham Ledger, then General Manager, Singita
The point is the noticing. Nobody asked for the gin bar. The team registered a preference, imagined an evening around it and built the evening. Susanne Hatje, then general manager of Mandarin Oriental, New York, told me about a guest who rented one of the hotel’s suites for their daughter’s thirteenth birthday and found that the team had filled it with sleeping bags, enough pillows to watch movies all night, a popcorn machine and an ice cream cart. Anyone with a credit card can rent a suite. The hotel asked itself what a thirteen year old’s perfect sleepover looked like and produced the actual party.
Chefs describe the same discipline in their own vocabulary. Niki Nakayama at n/naka in Los Angeles seats a small room and reads each diner’s pace across a long kaiseki progression, delaying the next course for the guest who is lingering and bringing it sooner for the one who is moving briskly. The diner never sees the calibration. Patrick O’Connell of The Inn at Little Washington in Virginia goes further in how he frames the work.
“I regard my work as a healing art form.” Patrick O’Connell, chef, The Inn at Little Washington
The language is grand, and the discipline beneath it is the same specific noticing Ledger and Hatje describe. The diner who arrives after a brutal week gets a different evening from the one who arrives celebrating, and the kitchen and the dining room calibrate together to make that happen.
Here is what the phrase means, then, in the plainest terms I can manage. Luxury is what an attentive human being can do for another. The hotels and restaurants in this book sell the experience of being known and of being attended to by people who have not had the discipline trained out of them by the platforms that mediate the rest of life. Attention was always what these operators were selling. The market is now in a position to see it, and to see why it costs what it does.
The Introduction sets out this argument in full, and A Final Note returns to it at the end. Chapter 9, Knowing Your Guest, follows attention into its most concrete form, the discipline of anticipation.