Wesley, the doorman, is wearing Bermuda shorts and long socks. He welcomes me at the entrance with a thermometer. He’s probably smiling but, like me, he’s wearing a mask, so I can’t be sure. I push my way through the double doors and clean my hands at the sanitiser station.
Everything feels normal, well, kind of. In the way all this has become normal.
But then suddenly it doesn’t, because the lobby of the Hamilton Princess is anything but normal. On my immediate left, there’s a blood-red Anish Kapoor dish mounted on the wall, inverting the reflection of the crowded room, and above is an oversized dog’s head, glossy black, cartoonish, by Yoshitomo Nara. A Jeff Koons’ mirrored Monkey (Blue) hangs near a kitsch statue, also by Koons, of a pair of ballerinas in cream tutus.
Scanning the walls, I take in Banksy’s petite, poignant etching, Girl with Balloon. Above me are eight prints from Andy Warhol’s Camouflage series, his last portfolio; three tiers of Nara paintings; and a pair of Shepard Faireys celebrating public healthcare workers, obviously quite new. The showstopper for me is the geometric sculptural sphere by Ai Weiwei, Untitled (Divina Proportione). Ai’s portrait, Cost of Expression, hangs on the opposite wall, one of Fairey’s best. Without realising it, I find myself holding my breath.
What’s striking is not only the concentration of art, but how it immerses us all, this throng of visitors, who are waiting, chatting, milling, scrolling.
I feel like we’re swimming, and instead of water, it’s the art that is swirling around us, slipping between us, rippling against us.
I had already felt a freedom of sorts, strangely unfamiliar, as my plane landed on this windswept near-Covid-free Atlantic island. That newfound liberty was now being compounded by the natural, generous way these artworks were being shown and shared. Taking a second look, I noticed fingerprints on the shiny concave surface of the Kapoor. A child stopped in its tracks beside Ai’s globe. “Look,” the boy called out to his mother, who was on her phone; she batted him off without a glance.
But the boy is right. Look. And look how close we can get, too. There are no ropes nor barriers nor “DO NOT TOUCH” signs. And it’s anything but the hushed reverence of an art gallery or museum. Instead, it’s kicked back; you can walk past in flip-flops, or even bare feet, on the way to your hired Renault Twizy for a dash to the beach. You can ignore the art around you, or let it drown you…
One of the bellboys interrupts me. “Reception is that way,” he points right. I turn, passing beneath Damien Hirst’s Cineole. Fumbling for my passport, I see behind reception four staggering Warhol Reigning Queens, sprinkled with diamond dust. Whether you like the monarchy or not, they work; you feel like you’ve arrived in the British Overseas Dependency of Bermuda. It’s an essential Warhol experience.
As I wait for my key to be programmed, I mess about behind me with an electronic installation, Flowers and People — Dark by teamLab, a moving screen artwork rendered in real time; the more I jiggle around, the more the flowers bud and blossom before their petals begin to wither.
All this, and I haven’t even reached my room. There are few hotels in the world so chocka with art as titillating as this.
Nearly 10 years ago, a local Bermudian family, led by brothers Alexander and Andrew Green, bought the hotel, bringing it home, as they like to say. With the purchase, they also found a repository for their remarkable art collection, which is now anything but private. They have flung open the doors on what they love, aesthetically speaking. When I ask them how it felt to share in this way, to expose themselves, particularly as a family known for trying to maintain its privacy, I sense some resignation. “We couldn’t be involved in the hotel and not be involved in the hotel,” Alexander says. “It’s impossible not to leave a part of us here.” Andrew agrees: “It’s an extension of ourselves.”
For the Green brothers, the sentimentality towards the property extends back to their childhood. “I drove past this hotel every day on the way to school,” Alexander says, “and my mother used to get her hair cut here by a man called Ernst. When I was older, it was Happy Hour at the bar. We can see the hotel from my father’s living room.” (Peter Green lives on a private island in the middle of Hamilton Harbour.)
The family might be new to the hotel game but the Hamilton Princess dates back more than 130 years. Over the decades, Hollywood greats, as well as New York and London high society, visited the nicknamed Pink Palace. Some came to party, others to be healed; with its fresh sea air, Bermuda—and the hotel—became known as a place to recover from pulmonary ailments (take note).
Since the acquisition, the Greens have spruced the place up, but the most significant addition is, of course, their art, taking visitors on a journey from the radical 1920s to Pop to Op to the contemporary. It’s not particularly profound art, which makes it perfect for a hotel that’s a little bit urban and a little bit resort. “We’re lucky that our aesthetic happens to be fun and playful,” Alexander says.
Not only is the content accessible but the presentation makes it easy to connect with, from the simple picture frames to anti-interpretive labelling. In fact, it’s so understated that the artworks can go unnoticed. Nobody seems to see Joep and Jeroen Verhoeven’s iridescent glass bubbles hanging in the lobby. And I watch two men in the bar, underneath and seemingly unaware of Kate Brinkworth’s glossy Distilled blue image of Bombay Sapphire gin bottles. On the way to the restrooms, there’s a Keith Haring Statue of Liberty with protestors at her feet. People walk straight past.
The Greens say they like that some art is missed. “We never force it on anyone,” Andrew says. “One of the great things here is that people have to find the art. If you’re interested, you can spend a day looking for gems hidden away.”
That spirit is captured in the mosaics by Invader, the French urban artist whose work is modelled on the crude pixellation of the 1970s video game, plastered sporadically through the hotel, slightly covertly; even the brothers confess they don’t know where they all are.
I find myself sneaking around the building, exploring service corridors, tiptoeing into roped-off areas, where there’s art at every turn. In a closed private dining room, I find a series of Warhol’s Mick Jagger prints, not far from sketches by Nelson Mandela. Santiago Montoya’s banknote portrait of the Queen is in an empty ballroom, as well as four Takashi Murakami panels of giddily smiling flowers.
There is also the conspicuous though. By the breakfast terrace is an exquisite bronze pumpkin by Yayoi Kusama, slap bang next to a gigantic KAWS cartoon character sculpture, titled At This Time. Andrew says he gets a kick out of seeing kids climb the latter; there’s no pretentiousness here, nor preciousness.
I watch a child, three or four years old, stop and stare up at the KAWS doll, which is looking to the sky; both doll and child hold the same posture, the doll’s chubby hands covering its eyes, the child staring wide-eyed, longer than I imagined he might, before running off.
“The hotel has allowed us to buy pieces that we would never justify buying for ourselves,” Andrew says. “Especially when they’re big, like these.” He pauses. “We’re always looking for something else.”
Towards the end of my stay, I notice a crew working opposite the elevators, who I assume are maintenance. Twenty-four hours later, I realise they were embedding a Banksy, an electronic artwork called TV Snow Boy. Staff told me that new acquisitions arrive with regularity and what is already here moves around. The collection does feel astonishingly effervescent.
The hitch might be that the Greens are running out of room. I noticed some wall-mounted lamps being moved higher up towards the ceiling to make space for new artworks. On my walk with Alexander, I cheekily point out a blank wall and he smiles. There’s clearly more coming.
Another solution is to buy another hotel, of course—which they recently did in St. Lucia. Sugar Beach is about to get a load of art, too.
I suggest what might be missing is a sense of place. Looking around, it could be the Saatchi or the MoMA. “But this is an urban hotel,” Andrew counters. “Bermuda is more dynamic than a typical island.”
It’s true, there is a deep sense of internationalism here, and at times it could be any big city hotel. That is, until you catch sight of the blue water of Hamilton Harbour, or you run down to the pool or marina, where, by chance, there’s a 13-metre Julian Opie mural depicting figures in strappy tops and cutoffs. It might be Opie, but this commission really speaks to Bermuda. It turns out the graphic British artist is a favourite of Alexander, who asked him to do his wife’s portrait. That was a generation after his father commissioned Andy Warhol to do a portrait of his wife (who died when Alexander and Andrew were children), which Andrew says seeded the family’s art collection. The art experience here does feel highly personal, not only about passion, but compassion, even fragility.
On leaving the hotel, the lobby was again crowded, the chairs all occupied, everyone looking down at their phones, the new modern-day posture. In the middle of the fray were six Opie busts displayed on a table, echoing the guests, their heads tilted down. Prescient stuff. I recalled the little boy who was so taken by the Ai Weiwei. “Look,” he had said. Let’s not forget to look.
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