Sounds like a disease doesn’t it? It’s not a disease, just a county on the Columbia River gorge. The name derives from a Chinook Indian word meaning ‘swift waters’, and the Skamania Lodge, our destination on Monday, gave super views across the river (and will be the subject of a future Review).Despite my years in hotel design, I have never supervised, or been involved in the onsite supervision of a photo-shoot before. These artists, David Phelps and his assistant Ethan, create their images for very different reasons to me. They are selling dreams to guests on behalf of the hotel, whereas my imagery is intended to show the spaces and their organisation for designers and hotelier readers of HotelDesigns ‘warts and all’. The spaces were to be dressed then photographed, an exercise in artistic perfection I am totally in awe of.
We left early on Monday morning having spent Sunday collecting the trailer and packing the items we were delivering to the hotel. Interesting ways the US differs from the UK. Skamania is just a hop skip and a jump from Seattle, but this translates to about 250 miles. I always thought that, looking at the map, Portland was virtually a suburb of Seattle, but that is a Brit scaling the map in British terms. Like navigating around continental Europe the distances are far greater than they appear on the map, especially to a map reader used to reading Britain. The drive took us down the I5, which I have previously driven northwards to Vancouver.
