The luxury hotel, as an architectural typology, is distinctive. In effect, it's a self-contained community, a building that immerses the well-off visitor into their local context. Self-contained communities they might be, but these hotels are also vessels of the wider socioeconomic character of a place, where luxury living is often next door to informal settlements in the most extreme examples of social inequality.
Across select regions of the African continent, luxury hotels have been, and continue to be, key city landmarks. The 102-year-old Stanley Hotel in Nairobi, for instance, is an unmissable part of the city's Central Business District. While some of these hotels may have an air of invincibility – continuing to be in operation for hundreds of years, some of these luxe buildings have been left abandoned and neglected, due to political turmoil or change to economic conditions in their immediate context.
