HAUGHTY HANGOUTS : 5-Star Slice of Travel Life Hidden at L’Ermitage

Take the soap, for example. (And many guests will.)

The well-known sliver has melted into hotel history, and now two plump beige ovals of French milled soap sit pristine on a small rattan tray. Sharing the tray are trial-size bottles of shampoo and bath gel, a bottle of Givenchy for Gentlemen and that traditional hotel amenity--the plastic shower cap.

Take the beige terry robes, trimmed in brown, folded on the long marble dressing table. But take them only for the moment, as a note reminds you: “This robe is for your personal use while a guest at L’Ermitage Hotel. If you would like to purchase one ($50), L’Ermitage Hotel will donate the proceeds to the Children’s Foundation. . . .”

Don’t worry. There are still plenty of freebies--complimentary wine, limos, trendy fizzy waters, pate and caviar, continental breakfasts, strawberries with sour cream and brown sugar sent daily to the suite for a healthful afternoon pick-me-up, even suntan lotion at the rooftop pool and overnight shoeshines.

Such goodies merely glaze the L’Ermitage cake, this rich slice of travel life that has garnered five-star citations--the Mobil Travel Guide Five Star Award and the AAA Five Diamond Award. And, if these ratings do not carry the weight that Michelin does in Europe, they are at least a part of the game in the United States.

Success does not come cheaply--either to the hotel or the traveler. If a couple sharing a suite used all the free services, it would cost the hotel at least $40 a day by its own reckoning. But don’t worry--according to the Philadelphia firm of Laventhal & Howarth, which compiles such statistics, L’Ermitage is one of only 23 U.S. hotels with a nightly tariff--an average “rack rate” in trade parlance--for a single guest of $200 or more.

For $205 to $255, a guest can rent one of the 64 one-bedroom Executive Suites--with a half-step-down sunken living room, a kitchenette, a dining area, a fireplace that snaps into flames with the pressing of a light switch--a la the 1950 soft-seduction movies of Rock Hudson and Doris Day. The bedroom is divided from the living area with a railing and a draw drape. Location within the hotel determines the actual rate--fourth-floor suites are more expensive than first-floor suites.

If the bedroom is divided from the living room by an actual wall, it becomes a Grand Suite--costing from $295 to $395. There are 17 of them, and also 25 one-bedroom town houses, seven two-bedroom town houses, with prices topping out at $1,250 a night for the three-bedroom town house.

Teeny Bathroom

In one $255-a-night fourth-floor suite, an ill-fitting wine rack is stuck into a cabinet supposed to house a stove, with a mismatched piece of wood perched on top, and the bed has a flowered spread that jars with its striped dust ruffle. The bathroom is teeny--a guest must close the door to get to the stall shower behind it, and the tub seems designed for a short person. In the bathroom is one of the suite’s three two-line, hold-button telephones with speakers. The low-level ceilings are covered with cottage-cheese soundproofing.

Still, the sweet smell of unrelenting service successfully distracts from such minor distractions.

“We have everything for the asking. We will bring you up a stove. Service for two or four. There are large white sheet towels from the pools. You can have them. We will bring you a dozen.” (None of which, it is understood, will appear as extras on the bill.)

Accented English

L’Ermitage owner Severyn Ashkenazy speaks in the accented English that is his inheritance from Tarnapol, Poland. He will turn 49 at the end of this week and made his money, according to a spokesperson, in real-estate development, on apartments designed for single people or small families along the Mid-Wilshire corridor and in West Hollywood.

In an interview, Ashkenazy was quick to be the first to mention the seemingly unluxurious touches in his hotel. Yes, the bathrooms at L’Ermitage are teeny--but, Ashkenazy explained, they were a “very good size” when the hotel was built 10 years ago and their floors will soon be redone in marble, as part of an overall remodeling plan. The terry robes are tres lightweight, compared to ones provided at Washington’s Hay Adams or any of the Ritz-Carltons or the Four Seasons--but, Ashkenazy explained, this is because California is hotter.

Owner of 6 Others

These days, Ashkenazy knows a lot about hotels, now owning six others in the West Hollywood and Sunset sections--Le Bel Age and Le Mondrian, opened last July; Le Dufy, opened in 1983; Le Parc, opened in 1979, and Le Reve and Le Valadon, set to open later this year. Except for Le Bel Age, the hotels were formerly used as apartment buildings.

But this was his first--the L’Ermitage Hotel de grande classe in the eastern beginnings of Beverly Hills. (Things in the Ashkenazy world are classified--Le Bel Age also being in the grande classe , but Le Modrian being de luxe .)

From Burton Way, the L’Ermitage facade looks unimposing enough to pass for classic in this world of the nervously nouveau--even when the bellman is sighted, attired in a California-weight Russian tunic.

Presence Guarded

Celebrity guests abound--entertainers and captains of industry. Their presence at the hotel is guarded and will never be confirmed to an outsider. Nevertheless, one day last week, Eddie Murphy, that Beverly Hills cop, could be seen in his red sweat pants in his fourth-floor suite, as the room service cart left the door ajar.

In the lobby, in the dark, paneled halls that are aired out daily, there are few chances for gawkers. There is not the harum-scarum of nighttime social life--no ballroom means no local lavish fund-raising balls, no large conventions. (There is also a collection of reproductions of the artwork in the actual L’Hermitage in Leningrad, but these copies will be replaced in time by other original oils, a hotel spokesperson said.)

Club Members

Originals now hang in the ornate but intimate Caffe Russe on the eighth floor. The dining room there holds a maximum 48 patrons, and diners and drinkers in the adjoining bar are restricted to hotel guests and private club members. The 100 club members get their card by donating at least $500 to the L’Ermitage Foundation, which then passes on grants to local charities such as Cedars-Sinai and Childrens Hospital.

The selectivity is a constant in a small luxury hotel--but such a hotel is a relatively new concept for travelers in America. For many years, Americans seemed bent on finding charm and exclusivity only when abroad.

In America, the business traveler before the 1970s usually had two choices--either a vast palace, like New York’s Waldorf-Astoria, or, more likely, a link in the motel-hotel chains that sprang from meager beginnings along interstates.

Safe Utilitarianism

On the road, charm seemed to count for little. It was the mileage made that day that mattered--fathers asking from the front seat, “How far can we get today?” And there was something particularly wonderful in the safe utilitarianism of Motel 6. A patron paid the six bucks and knew what he was getting: basic, clean, uniform, all at 6 bucks a night, the K-ration of sleeping arrangements. This was not remotely in the tradition of European hotels--a hotel like L’Ermitage has as much in common with an American motel as Chicken Cordon Bleu has with Chicken McNuggets.

The all-suite hotel, according to a spokesman for the American Hotel and Motel Assn., with no ballrooms or conventions and with an emphasis on service to lodgers is now growing in popularity. The popularity, naturally, would be confined to large, urban centers with travelers with large urban expense accounts. It might be hard to believe when looking at the country from New York or Los Angeles, but only 15% of the more than 2 million hotel rooms in the United States cost more than $85 a night.

A New Wave

Ashkenazy was at the crest of the breaking wave of small, luxury hotels. He said he realized more than 10 years ago that “times change. I came to the conclusion that the hotel industry did not change. If my friends and I could not be satisfied, then. . . .”

When Ashkenazy first envisioned his hotel--contrary to what he calls the popular myth that it started as a condominium development--he thought it would be similar to New York’s Carlyle, where many wealthy patrons keep apartments year-round. Something less than 10% of the L’Ermitage suites are on long-term leasing arrangements, but 60% of his business, Ashkenazy said, is returning guests.

Ashkenazy takes chances and wins. Like his choice of Alexis Eliopulos as vice president and general manager at L’Ermitage. She came to work for his corporation in the 1970s as a part-time legal secretary. Working her way up to special assistant to Ashkenazy, she asked in 1976 to learn the hotel business. “Under a fictitious name, I went through all the ranks--from switchboard operator, night clerk, a dispatcher in housekeeping.” After a year, she became the assistant manager at the hotel.

Won Five Stars

In January of 1979, she was appointed general manager. “I have taken it from a three-star property and made it a five-star property--the first woman to accomplish the five stars,” she said.

Eliopulos likes the “hands-on” running of the hotel, keeping track of staffs and details, the details that keep bringing back people with no limits to personal money, professional demands or expense accounts.

At L’Ermitage, a full maintenance staff is on hand 24 hours a day. At 7:30 p.m., a faulty shower is reported--instead of streaming and pulsating, it only mildly sprinkles and mostly upwards. A plumber arrives within five minutes, with a new shower head. A printed note reminds the guest that a call to room service will have dishes removed--and a waiter appears within minutes to do so.

Godiva Chocolate

There is that wonderful invention called “turn-down service,” with a maid arriving in the early evening to remove the spread and turn down the bed, the candy placed on the pillow here being a gold-foil-wrapped Godiva chocolate--inside a small box with the L’Ermitage crest.

Twenty-four hours a day, room service will bring other nourishments, with no added cost over the prices operative in the restaurant or at daytime hours. From the “late supper” menu a guest could choose toast with butter and preserves or marmalade at $2, or a bagel with cream cheese for $4.50, or a tuna sandwich for $7.50--prices not considered high by frequent travelers.

The menu served in the Cafe Russe upstairs is hardly nouvelle, but it is tasty and the portions are large--grilled chicken breast with tomatoes and curry at $18.25 translates to two hefty splits of a breast. The desserts are merely mundane--chocolate mousse, Peach Melba, ice creams. Some chatting goes on between the tables--but then, they are all enclosed in this ship of social state. Guests are presumed to dine in the Cafe Russe at least once during a short stay.

Guests could also be presumed not to have good hotel training. Why else the well-polished brass plaques in hallways and elevators reminding them that shoes and robes are to be worn at all times? And, of course, the asterisk notation on the laundry list, “Shirts with polyester will not hold starch.”