Vitval Orfjall Vebjorn Ejler

Some years ago when I was a pin-striped highwayman, I stayed in a hotel just outside Birmingham; Oldbury, it might have been.

 If you can picture 4 or 5 terraced houses knocked through to make one big dwelling you have an idea of the external structure of the hotel.  To capitalise on this internally the management had used the several sets of stairs and a myriad of rooms to deliberately and quaintly complicate its layout.

To find your room you had to schlep up and down several sets of stairs, zig-zagging from the front of the hotel to the back (and back again several times), sometimes even reversing on yourself.  What a jolly jape.

To assist in this your room key was colour coded to the colour of your bedroom door, which you found by following the same coloured line marked out on the corridor floor, up and down, backwards and forwards, round and round (like a teddy bear).  It looked a bit like a map of the London Underground.

Enchanting and novel and, in the event of a fire, a death-trap.

All this was over 20 years ago and I suspect subsequent Health and Safety inspections have stopped all of that.

But we have just moved house and while we were shopping for furniture found this delightful death-trap alive and kicking….

….at Ikea.

Lillasen Kullaberg Arkelstorp