What I’ve learnt about luxury

What do you look for in a luxury hotel? For me it’s the quality of the pillows every time. You can keep your fancy hair products, exotic fruit bowls and hooded towelling robes; give me two perfectly puffy goose down pillows and I can forgive almost anything – well, maybe not a lumpy mattress.

Luxury enticements don’t come much more lavish than Dubai’s Burj Al Arab, the self proclaimed ‘seven star’ hotel that featured on the BBC’s Inside Dubai and wears its decadence on its sail-like sleeve. The Burj is the only hotel I’m aware of that offers a menu containing seventeen different kinds of pillow including an Anti-Ageing Premium Down option lavished with ‘traces of vitamins’. After some agonising indecision I personally plumped for the enticing ‘Body Roll’ filled with a combination of pure white goose down and siliconised, hollow fibre balls.

For all its extravagance – £5000 cocktails, Aston Martins on tap and an embarrassment of gold leaf (2,000sqm to be precise), the Burj comes across as a relic of more carefree times when flash was king and more was always better.