What Makes Hotel Sex Hot

Hotel sex, you told us in the Zoomer Sex Survey 2014, is something special.

Hotter than on a faux fur rug in front of the fire, hotter than on the dining room table after a carafe of Amarone– that’s how you feel about hotel sex.

What’s the allure of a hotel room? What makes it such a romantic setting?

We asked Canadian hotel maven Rosalie Sharp.

The 76-year old interior designer has set the scene in more than 5,000 hotel rooms and suites for Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts, the company founded and chaired by her husband, Isadore Sharp.

First of all, she says, hotel rooms are new and unfamiliar places, private and suggestive — “not at all like home.” They’re alluring because they exist outside your normal routine.

Elegant and luxurious, or economical and basic, they’re all dominated by a bed — a spacious bed made up with fresh linens, just begging to be mussed and tousled.

A Do Not Disturb sign is waiting on the door. Often, there are two plush white terrycloth robes suggesting it’s a time and place to get undressed — “the sensual thing of being naked but for the robes,” says Rosalie Sharp.

And the room service menu is poised to provide postcoital nourishment.

“After sex, you can put on the nice cuddly terrycloth robe and order a clubhouse sandwich and french fries at three in the morning.”

In a hotel room, Sharp says, you could have sex undisturbed for so long “you don’t even know what day it is, whether it’s still yesterday or today or tomorrow.”

But all you have to do is pick up the newspaper at the door to check the dates, suggests Sharp, with a chuckle.

Decor for rooms at resorts, where people come to get away from the everyday, should be especially conducive to relaxing and romance, she explains.

“Usually hotel rooms have to be in the latest fashion, which was cabbage roses for a time. Now they have to be mid-century.”

If Sharp were designing a hotel room now for sexy time outs and trysts, she says, “I would paint it in layers of colors to make it black with depth, not just flat black. I’d have artists from the Ontario College of Art and Design (where she’s a board member) do abstract oils and hang them all around. The furniture would be shades of black and grey.

“And that,” she adds, “would be very sexy and mysterious.”

But wait, there’s still the bathroom!

She envisions the bathtub in the middle of the room, with steps leading up to it.

“It’s a tub for two, of course,” she says. “You could do a Monet room, with water lilies on the walls and water lilies floating in the bathtub, with the water colored blue or green.

Or, she suggests, you could have a theme of Van Gogh’s sunflowers.

And that’s what’s so delicious about hotel rooms.

“At home you wouldn’t want to live in a Van Gogh sunflower room,” she says. “At home, you’d want a quiet background. But a hotel room could be wild and outlandish and ridiculous — which allows you to be all those things.”

Best of all, she says, “What I like about hotel rooms is that you can be anonymous.”

In other words, you can be whoever and whatever you want. Because hotel rooms aren’t just a place for escaping from everyday routine. They’re a place for escaping from your everyday self: trying new things, seeing yourself and your significant other in a different way. And that is what makes hotel sex deserve a special mention in the Zoomer Sex Survey.