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Let’s be honest about hotels. We love them for all their perks: prime location, room service, housekeepers, porters, pools, hot tubs, saunas, fitness centres, Wi-Fi, a full-service bar downstairs, waiting taxis right outside and a concierge to look after every little detail or emergency. These amenities make up for being away from our families and our stuff, away from the daily routines and relationships that round out our lives. A great hotel compensates for the things you’re missing by providing things you wish you had.

But what if you could have it all? Your spouse, your family, your stuff – and four-star room service any time of day or night? That’s the promise of condominium hotels, or condotels, where residents own their suites and have access to hotel amenities. Like the great hotels of the railway era, condotels are the landmark buildings of the global information age. In Vancouver, the stunning new Shangri-La is the city’s tallest building. Even aging landmarks aspire to be condotels: Montreal’s famed Ritz-Carlton is undergoing a full makeover to return to its rightful place among the world’s best luxury hotels – with 46 residences to prove it.

Yet for all their aspirations, condotels are much more down to earth. “They cater to the restless people who move around the world,” says Bob Pickard, a public relations executive who recently returned to Toronto after a 13-year condotel-living stint in Seoul and Tokyo. He and his family lease a suite at the SoHo Metropolitan Hotel, where they take elevator rides with expatriates from Germany, France and elsewhere. When Pickard and his highly mobile peers find themselves in a foreign place, the condotel and its staff serve as cultural shelter and translator. They’re vertical subdivisions for affluent nomads. But with the corporate jet set rushing in and out of our cities, what happens to the idea of neighbourhoods in the global economy?

When you can’t peer over the fence to chat, you do it with the doorman or the concierge. Some might find it depressing to substitute paid staff for the couple next door, but the relationships are essentially the same. “Suburban friendliness is pretty generic,” says Gordon Price, the director of the City Program, which offers courses on urban issues, at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University. According to Price, neighbourly relations are largely built on formality, on the how-do-you-dos and what-rotten-weathers that work easily with any stranger. “When you live in higher densities, you become more selective in your interactions simply because you have so many more options.” And because everyone is being more selective, no one is offended by the lack of intimacy – a welcome change from the nosy neighbours of suburbia. Besides, he says, with so many chance encounters in a single day, a condotel “can be a great place to fall in love.”

Neighbourliness aside, in a condotel, gazing out the window is like watching stock footage of urban life: cubicle drones in nearby highrises, cars and people coming and going, shop doors opening and closing, thousands of trajectories intersecting in every direction. But the city’s energy isn’t just outside; it’s beating in the hallway. “You always feel like you’re completely plugged in to what’s going on in the city, what big conference or event is on,” says Stuart Smith, a 35-year-old wealth advisor who works in Toronto’s financial district, two blocks away from the One King West property where he once lived. And each event transforms the vibe in the hallways. “When the Yankees are here to play the Blue Jays, the hotel is crawling with Yankees fans,” he says, evoking the echoes of “Noo Yawkah” accents in the lobby. When the contestants for the Miss Universe Canada pageant stayed at One King West, the scent of perfume lingered in the elevators.

Perhaps the greatest virtue of condotels is that they put an end to the last widely accepted form of social segregation: the divide between residents and travellers. That was one of the driving forces behind a stunning condotel proposal – complete with a rolling seaside promenade built atop the units – for the English town of Weston-super-Mare by the London architecture firm Agents of Change. “The reason tourists seek out vacation cottages in small villages is that these places haven’t been completely transformed by tourism,” says architect Tom Coward. Placing travellers in the middle of local rites and routines creates a stronger sense of place; Coward calls it “inclusive exclusivity.” “In a small town, there’s a lot of ambiguity between public and private,” he says. “That should be part of the development.”

Inclusive exclusivity is a pretty good description of how Stuart Smith lived during his two years at One King West. What he remembers most fondly are the surreal clashes between hotel high life and workaday routines – like riding the elevator, grocery bags in hand, alongside giddy bridesmaids headed to a wedding reception in the ballroom. “Those moments were weird but fun,” he says. Strangers in that elevator, they all got a glimpse into each other’s private lives and came out with a knowing smile. And maybe that’s what the global village looks like. In a place where nobody knows your name, intimacy may be fleeting, but it still finds a way to creep into your life.

Web Exclusive: Check out our favourite condotels opening soon across Canada. 

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