New Hotel in Donnybrook – sneak(ish) preview

February 12th, 2009 · No Comments

I managed to combine two of my favourite activities: I got to test out the movie function on the Nikon D90 and I got material to opine on Dublin’s newest hotel. The Hampton opened this week on the site of an old Dublin landmark, the Sachs hotel.

I got to talk to several ladies of advancing age, having lunch and trying to relive their old stamping ground in the hotel. They seemed ’sporty’ (that’s a bad joke for those of you that have seen Intermission).

Since this is a blog that is meant to be about visits to places and what they’re like, I’m going to do the Hotel first and the camera second. Decor is interesting and particular in style as it should be in a Boutique Hotel, service is friendly and personal and the rooms are as good as I’ve seen, I had to look twice (and behind) a fireplace in the bedroom to see if it was electric or gas. It was electric, but they’ve moved on from a red bulb under a semi tranparent plastic mold of coal in yer grannys front room, I’ll get a pic of one later.

If you’re looking for a hotel with a pool and a gym, you wont want to stay there, you’d be better looking at other Donnybrook hotels. The building is an old row of nicely restored georgian houses, made to house the well heeled in centuries gone by. The hotels website says that it does have Free Internet, but I didn’t try it out to test the speed. I did however get this walk through of their drawing room, lobby and bar at about 3pm:

Hampton Hotel Donnybrook

I had the cod and chips in the bar, nice pice of fish, would recommend a stop off when the traffics too bad to check out the bar and the fish. They showed me the suite, it had a double walk in shower and two toilets. I didn’t ask how much it was a night, I knew it wasn’t for me .

For those interested in reliving the glory days of the 70’s club scene, They tell me they’re going to do a history section on the old Sachs place and the infamous club that was in it on their website). Get ready for sepia tone images of dancing at the crossroads (of Anglesea road )

Now, onto the camera: Disappointed. I had images of movie camera quality with my 14-24mm f2.8 Nikon zoom, and while the youtube encoding doesn’t give it full justice, it also hides some of the problems with it.

The are black bands that go up the screen, reminiscent of the old days pre-satellite when the fog would come in and S4C would go a bit funny, and panning too quickly looks like it drops frames. I used a fast SD card as the shop recommended, but I’m sorry: it went back to the shop.

Never mind: looks like redone are doing a nikon mount from that space alien 4K movie camera they make.