On Not Turning Every Light Off in the Room

It is the commonest self-directed adjustment in these bookings. A guest who has spent a fortnight worrying about his body arrives at the last twenty minutes of the arrival window and starts turning lights off, and by the time there is a knock the room is essentially dark.

The logic is obvious and the result is not what he wanted. Here is why.

It reads as shame rather than as atmosphere

A room with one low lamp reads as considered. A room with nothing on reads as a decision that somebody has made about themselves, and it announces the exact thing it was meant to hide. Nobody says anything about it, of course, which means the announcement just sits there for the whole hour.

Low light is flattering and forgiving and does most of what the guest wanted. No light does something different.

It makes the room harder to work in

This is the unromantic one. There is oil involved, and towels, and a surface that may be on the floor, and a bathroom to get to and back from. A room where nobody can see the edge of anything is a room where things get knocked over and where somebody ends up using a phone torch, which is a worse light than the lamp would have been.

It also removes the ability to read a face, which matters more than people expect. A great deal of the adjustment in an hour like this happens by one person noticing something in the other's expression. In the dark, all of that has to be said out loud instead, and a nervous guest is precisely the person least likely to say it.

It removes something you paid for

Worth saying plainly. Seeing the person who is in the room with you is part of the thing. A guest who has organised the evening so that nobody can see anything has also organised it so that he cannot, and that is a poor trade made in a hurry.

What to do instead

One lamp, at table or floor height, not the overhead. If the room has only ceiling lights, the bathroom light with the door ajar is the standard solution and it works well. Curtains closed. If there is a lamp with a harsh bulb, put it in the corner and point it at the wall.

Do not put a towel over a lampshade. It is a genuine fire risk with a hot bulb and it is not worth the two degrees of dimming it buys.

Candles are fine if the room allows them and a nuisance if it does not, and in a hotel it usually does not.

The adjustment that actually helps

Warmth, not darkness. The thing a self-conscious guest is reaching for when he turns the lights off is a room in which he can stop bracing, and temperature delivers that far more reliably than dimness does. A room at twenty-three degrees with one lamp on will do more for the first ten minutes than a cold room with none.

The other adjustment is the towel. Keeping one at the start is completely ordinary, nobody registers it as anything, and it does the job the darkness was being asked to do, without any of the side effects. Say in the thread that you would rather start that way and it is simply how the hour is set up.

Where it goes

Most guests who start with the lights very low stop caring about them somewhere in the second half hour, and a fair number turn one back on. That is not willpower and it is not a breakthrough. It is the subject changing, which is what tends to happen once the room has been warm and quiet for a while.

A note on the mirror

Several rooms in the centre put a full-length mirror opposite the bed, a decision made for the look of the room rather than for anybody in it. If that mirror is going to occupy you, move it, turn it, or hang a towel over it before she arrives. It is a two-minute job and a far better use of the impulse than switching the lights off, because it removes the one thing that was bothering you and leaves the rest of the room intact.