Grand hotels of the jazz age

"The Breakers, the Waldorf-Astoria, the Miami Biltmore, the Pierre - these landmark hotels are synonymous with luxury and glamour. When they were built, during the Roaring Twenties, their refined elegance and grandeur set the bar for hotels and resorts the world over. Responsible for creating these and countless other luxury hotels was a single architectural firm: Schultze & Weaver. Catering to the social elite, of which they themselves were a part, the firm's partners designed these bastions of the leisure class and engineered the modern conveniences that made their guests feel at home - elaborate entrance lobbies, grand ballrooms, private dining rooms, round-the-clock room service, specialty shops, beauty parlors, and full-service laundries, all operating effortlessly thanks to enormous staffs that moved undetected throughout the buildings, using discrete entrances, hidden corridors, and service elevators." "This illustrated book presents fourteen of Schultze & Weaver's most spectacular resorts and hotels in vivid detail, with more than two hundred period photographs, hand-colored renderings, and memorabilia. In addition, four engaging essays chart the ascent of the firm and of the luxury hotel in all its glory, in the years just before the Great Depression forever changed the way America's privileged class lived."--Jacket.