The Six Weeks We Close

On the sixth of January the last car goes down the hill and the gate stays shut until the middle of February. It costs us about nine per cent of the year’s revenue, and it is the least negotiable thing we do.

A building on a cliff does not age the way a building in a town does. Salt gets into everything. The render on the seaward elevation has to be cut back and replaced in sections roughly every four years, and the only way to know which sections is to tap the whole wall by hand, which takes eleven days.

What Actually Gets Done

The list runs to about four hundred items and it is written the previous October, mostly by Marc, who has been here twenty-two years and can hear a failing pump through a closed door.

The big ones repeat: the sea wall, the lift mechanism, the flat roof over the spa, and every one of the eighty-six bathrooms gets its silicone cut out and redone. The small ones are stranger — a door in the east wing that has swollen every February since 2009 and is planed back every year rather than replaced, because the original oak is no longer made.

“If you skip a January you do not notice in February. You notice four years later, and by then it is not a repair, it is a rebuild.”

Why It Is Six Weeks And Not Three

Because render needs to cure, because the stonemason works alone by choice, and because the team that does it are the same people who run the floor for the other forty-six weeks. They get January to do one thing properly instead of two things badly.

It also means everybody takes their holiday at once, which is the only reason a hotel this size can guarantee its staff a fortnight off together. That was Ana’s condition in 1994 and nobody has managed to argue her out of it since.

Marc Devaux

General Manager

Twenty-two years on the headland, started as a night porter, and knows every pipe in the building by the sound it makes.