“Don’t stay in a bad place where they don’t care how you are.”
—David Bowie, “Everyone Says ‘Hi’”

I am not a happy camper.

My earliest memories of being on holiday as a child are of camping with my mom and dad, the three of us crammed into a six-man army tent made of heavy olive-green canvas.

Whenever it rained, which was always, there was nowhere else to go but back inside the tent. Hours spent playing Monopoly on a warped board or just staring out into the lack of space. You could easily lose your balance inside the tent, too, accidentally leaving a perfect palm print on the inside wall that would immediately begin leaking rainwater in the shape of your hand, a wet slap in the face.

To me as a kid, there was something haunting about the notion of six soldiers trying to sleep in that tent, maybe somewhere in Vietnam in the ’60s, or Korea a decade earlier, a canvas tarp their only shelter from monsoon season and never-ending artillery fire, nights spent much like their days, in constant discomfort, in constant fear for their lives.

I could imagine nothing worse than that — except, of course, for us piled together in the pouring rain in the tent the six of them eventually died in. That is not how I spell holiday.

This is why I don’t hate a posh hotel. And there are many in Montreal to choose from.

It’s called a ‘staycation’ — when you can’t quite afford a flight to some tropical destination, but you can afford a few nights of hospitality in a place that isn’t your crappy apartment. It might even be just down the street from your crappy apartment. You don’t have to go very far to go on vacation in this city. Especially if you live here, all it takes is a minor shift in perspective and Montreal comes to you.

For regular readers, you may be asking yourself, is this the same Ryan Alexander Diduck who liberally quotes Mark Fisher and habitually hates on capitalism as if it were the devil personified? Yes.

On my birthday four years ago, I decided to take a room at the Birks Hotel on Square Phillips and Sainte-Catherine Street, overlooking what used to be The Bay. I imagined Leonard Cohen checking into a hotel somewhere exotic in the 1980s, unloading an Underwood typewriter onto the desk and setting a few packs of Benson & Hedges near the ashtrays that used to come standard in hotel rooms back in those days.

I no longer smoked, nor drank, nor did anything fun, and my Underwood was a MacBook Air which I nonetheless set up at the window, proceeding for the next three days and nights to drink Nespresso and sparkling water and write the first few articles that would become NicheMTL. Those rare days at the Birks Hotel restored me more than a week on the beach drinking Singapore Slings in Tahiti — or Tahiti Treats in Singapore.

Montreal, and any major city, is a different place when viewed from above. The quotidian assumes a poetic resonance. At any given moment, you can witness someone making a mess, and someone else cleaning it up. A child dropping an ice cream cone on the pavement; a dog scratching behind its ear; a woman’s hat blowing away in the breeze. These flashes when viewed from the 6^th floor of a luxury hotel become events, with everyday life making a more meaningful impression.

The ceiling at Brasserie Henri, the restaurant in the Hôtel Birks, is sculpted with the shining visages of cherubim and seraphim — although I can never remember which are the ones that hang from the roof of the cave. There is a Parisian elegance about the place that only American tourists can ruin. But if you squint your eyes, you can imagine yourself sitting in another era, when people read newspapers instead of scrolling through screens, when Montreal was romantic and new.

Closer to the present time, I was walking down Saint-Jacques Street a few months ago and noticed that an historic edifice that had been under construction for several years was now open. I wandered in and marvelled at the ambiguous surroundings. Not quite a café, a restaurant, or a bar, but neither a traditional hotel lobby, generative videos projected on the walls like the office of Number 2 in The Prisoner, I wondered, ‘what the hell is this place?’

It turned out to be SonoLux, a new hotel/restaurant/lounge/contemporary art gallery that had recently soft-launched in Old Montreal. This is an unlikely but decidedly niche combination of endeavours, ambitious in execution, especially in the post-pandemic era when Airbnb shuttered the nearby St. James Hotel, and conceptual lodging companies like Sonder went bankrupt. SonoLux, though, is doing something different.

36 identical and minimally appointed rooms. LUMI, a gastronomy-lovers paradise with dishes that executive chef Graham Hood designs and prepares. Subterra, a basement bar with a vinyl-centric hi-fi DJ booth that JoJo Flores and Fred Everything programme. Installations on each floor displaying surprisingly interesting works of visual art — the first show curated by Cheryl Sim of Centre PHI and soundtracked by local experimental electronic duo Mue.

Hotel art is usually an afterthought, not much more than royalty-free images stuck in prefab frames found at Bed, Bath & Beyond. It is refreshing, then, that a place of lodging would position art front-and-centre in the traveler’s itinerary. Amidst all the corporate galleries that populate the neighbourhood, SonoLux is actually a destination, along with Centre PHI and Fonderie Darling, on the map of exhibition spaces worth visiting. And you can stay overnight.

SonoLux and the Birks Hotel offer polar opposite but nonetheless very Montreal experiences. Neither is a franchise; they are singular places with unique features. They offer old- and new-world extravagance. They are both ‘immersive’ without feeling as if you’re submerged in a vulgar or generic atmosphere. They both pay incredible attention to detail. And they both are ideal quintessential staycation destinations for discerning Montrealers.

I love my parents for showing me the beauty and serenity of the great outdoors, for instilling in me an admiration of nature nurtured for weeks on end in our nation’s campgrounds. But I don’t miss waking up soggy and smelling of campfire smoke and insect repellant, rainwater dripping into my sleeping bag, a coin-operated shower the only indulgence.

I once asked Slavoj Žižek when we met in 2008 at the Telluride Film Festival how he could justify writing about socialism while essentially travelling from one luxury hotel to another, and in his characteristic lisp, he said, “Ryan, in order to create revolution, you must be comfortable!” The notion of the starving artist is illusory and only benefits the ruling class. Artists create best when they are fed and watered, rested and ready. And nothing rests and readies the creative mind quite like sojourning in a place like the Birks, or SonoLux.

A plush hotel, especially in your own city, for even a night or two, is enough of a vacation to recharge your batteries and give you a fresh perspective on life. There is no place for a holiday quite like home.◼︎

Cover image: LUMI at SonoLux photographed for NicheMTL.