Old School Vacation in an Old School Motel

My lovely wife and I have spent the last few days at the Postcard Inn in St. Pete Beach, Florida.  The motel is a vintage 1950s era hotel with rooms arranged around a central courtyard and swimming pool.

Since I am officially on vacation, I will make only a few little observations.  The rooms are small! So I can only assume people in the 1950s must have been much smaller or taken up less space.  I’ve been fortunate enough to stay in quite a few nice hotels over the last few years and almost without exception the rooms were far larger than I needed to do what it was that I was doing at the hotel (mostly sleeping and showering).  The pink tiles in the bathroom are just a bonus!

The arrangement around the courtyard assumes that people want to interact with one another.  The rooms lack private balconies. Instead the focal point of the motel is public, communal space.

Finally, the hotel lobby has a polished concrete floor.  These are great archaeological objects because no matter how hard you polish them, they preserve some evidence for the past organization of the space.  The floors shows at least two tile patterns, the line of a now destroyed wall, and the general organization of the various organizations of the lobby.  So the nostalgic theme is carried from the organization of the motel space (and its social implications) to the very physical fabric of the architecture.

The photos are by my wife.