A room at the top

The Savoy Group of hotels is a symbol of all that is most stately, rarefied and splendid about our national traditions: unchanging monuments in a naughty world, places where the wealthy can climb between linen sheets, sink into hand-made feather mattresses and count their blessings.

So, the Nineties being the sort of decade it is turning out to be, it is appropriate that the group is in seething turmoil. Trusthouse Forte battled for 14 years to control it: now struggling for survival against Granada, it is preparing to dump the precious cargo unceremoniously overboard. For its part, Granada has also pledged, if it succeeds in swallowing Forte, to spit the Savoy Group out again soon afterwards.

Back on its own again, will the group manage to hold on to the independence it once held so dear? "The only option on the table, if Forte beat Granada off," says Piers Pottinger, spokesman for the group, "is for them to distribute the Savoy Group shares among Forte's shareholders and for us then to carry on as a normal independent company, which is what we want to do." But the buzzards already blackening the sky suggest a different fate.

Three huge American chains - Marriott, Hilton and Sheraton - are said to be interested in bidding. Speculation about other possible buyers is rife. Whoever takes control will find, as Forte did, that the share structure crafted by the late head of the group, Sir Hugh Wontner, means that actual control of the hotels remains with the Wontner family trust. But even that may not remain true for long: another pervasive and plausible rumour says that the surviving family members will be happy to cash in their stake when the moment is ripe. Everything will then be up for grabs.

The Savoy, Claridge's, the Connaught and the Berkeley - the group's London hotels - define the smell, the feel and the look of luxury: marble, gilt, chintz, buttoned leather, limed oak, yew, fluted columns, blazing chandeliers; flunkies in bow ties and tails; a special calm in the heart of the city, a calm that murmurs to the wealthy: this is your true reward. The Savoy and its sisters can claim to have brought these effects to perfection, but any monopoly they might once have had on them is long gone, and with it the spectacular occupancy rates they once enjoyed. Now they struggle to lift occupancy above 65 per cent, while rivals such as the Dorchester are closer to 90 per cent.

The lineaments of grande luxe are the cliches of every Holiday Inn and Thistle and Forte Crest in the country. Gilt and chandeliers and that wealthy amber glow are the wherewithal of every chain hotel in the world now. And these pretenders and usurpers come armed with fax machines and video players and casinos and fitness and business centres, while the originators, in some cases, still struggle to install air-conditioning.

In a world where the superficial appearance of grand luxury is available around every corner, where the eye is sated and the palate jaded with all that heavy Edwardian opulence, what future can there be for the real thing?

An odd fellow haunts the Savoy Hotel's loo. He just stands there, shifting from foot to foot, beaming amiably, filling and emptying the basins. When you have relieved yourself, the basin earmarked for you is already prepared, steaming gently. The towel comes to your dripping hands unasked, then, unasked, any specks of dust that may have alighted on your shoulders are brushed away.

At the cloakroom, a looming Oddjob with a gleaming bald pate returns your coat, then nips out from behind his counter and helps you to put it on. He has a little cushioned tray for tips - only pound coins need apply.

Lunch in the restaurant is about pounds 27 for the fixed menu, though with a glass of wine, VAT and service, there is paltry change from pounds 40. After you order, a young Frenchman arrives bearing a single canape. "A canape," he declares: a little present. Afterwards you decline pudding, so instead they bring a selection of handmade sweets cradled on a handcrafted biscuit. You decline a second cup of coffee: they know you are kidding, so they bring the pot anyway.

After more than two years of what the literary agent and hotel-fancier Hilary Rubinstein calls "Forte-fication", the quality and quantity of personal attention is impressive; weird, perhaps, to the unaccustomed, but a striking contrast to the more normal Trust House experience: a single wan, harassed figure attempting to man a long bar, surrounded by dirty glasses. Plenty of staff is perhaps the first rule of running a luxury hotel: that's why eating at the Connaught is like trying to bat against a close field. Waiters lurk on every side, ready to pounce if you so much as drop a toothpick.

When Forte finally got a majority share in the Savoy Group, following Sir Hugh Wontner's death in 1992, many feared the worst; and when they brought about the ousting of Giles Shepard, the general manager, and his replacement by a Spaniard, Ramn Pajares, the harrumphing was awesome. Soon word emerged of the swingeing changes that "Rayon Pajamas", as people began calling him, was imposing, and the dire predictions seemed all too accurate. The firm's in-house printing department was to close, the meat department likewise, the magnificent cellar of wines, worth millions, broken up, the in-house embroidery of bathrobes cut short.

Yet today, as the Savoy Group prepares for the fight of its life by publishing estimates of its 1995 profits - 165 per cent up on 1994, to pounds 11.4m - criticism of the changes he has pushed through is surprisingly muted. "Forte-fication was expected to leave a lot of bruises," says Hilary Rubinstein, "but Pajares has gone out of his way to minimise them. There is no suggestion that they have been seriously cheapened in grandeur. While Hugh Wontner was still alive, there was perhaps an ossification. Pajares has perhaps been a very useful man to put in the changes that needed making."

Greg Feelhey, a leisure analyst at Kleinwort Benson, is fulsome in his praise of the Pajares effect. "The relationship between Forte and the Savoy Group has improved enormously as a result of bringing in Pajares," he says. Of course, it's hard to imagine how it could have got worse: the animosity between Sir Rocco Forte's father, Charles, and Sir Hugh was intense and personal, Sir Hugh always prone to making hurtful remarks such as: "I've known little Forte since he ran his milk bar."

In Pajares, Sir Rocco hit on a man able to heal these wounds: able to transform business performance while tenderly preserving the mystique. "The Four Seasons Hotel, which Pajares managed before," Greg Feelhey goes on, "was for a long time the most profitable hotel in London. The whole thing about running hotels like this is retaining the mystique but running them far more profitably.

"The Savoy's huge cellar, the in-house embroidery - these are nice personal touches, but they are more reflective of the 1890s than the 1990s. These hotels have to compete with many other very upmarket hotels around the world. You want to keep the same customers coming in - Kerry Packer comes to the Savoy in the summer and stays for three months, block-booking entire floors - but we believe they are still below their profit potential. We think they could make pounds 20 million a year."

With prospects like that, the Savoy Group is unlikely to be short of suitors. But according to Peter Longbottom of the magazine Hotel and Catering Business, only a very special sort of businessman need apply. "You need someone with an awful lot of money - and long-term money," he says. "You need a tremendous combination of cash flow and ongoing investment. The higher up the scale of hotels you go, the more arduous is the work of keeping up standards to attract the cream of the customers."

The Savoy Group, for example, is committed to a pounds 58m capital expenditure programme to refurbish and upgrade the Savoy, Claridge's and the Berkeley; Peter Longbottom cites also the example of the Dorchester, owned by the Sultan of Brunei, which closed for two years in the late 1980s for refurbishment but went to extraordinary lengths to maintain the loyalty of its regular guests during the hiatus, booking them into other hotels and sending representatives to greet them there, and asking them along as usual to the annual polo match.

That sort of detail, all agree, is what counts. It's touching, really: the people who frequent hotels such as the Savoy have, by definition, access to every self-indulgence the fancy can conceive; but what they want more than anything else is to be treated like human beings, like old friends.

"I've grown to feel sorry for the wealthy," says John Hatt, who has travelled the world writing about luxury hotels for Harpers & Queen. "You'd think you could just go out and buy charm - but you can't. Many hotels that purport to be grand are very, very bad. Others are very efficient and have every facility you could dream of - but they have no charm. And that's what the rich all around the world want. When you get up to a certain level, it's not down to science but alchemy."

Due to Ramn Pajares's special touch - a lot to do, people say, with treating his staff right - the hotels of the Savoy Group have so far defied the inevitable, and retained their mystique, their alchemy, their charm. "If you want class, that's still the only place to get it," says Hilary Rubinstein, rejecting the claims of rivals such as the Dorchester or the Ritz. But for how much longer? John Hatt dreads the arrival of a large predator, "who will swear blind that's he's buying it for its character - then the men in grey suits get to work and it's never the same again".

But while the suits remain hypothetical and the circling buzzards are still far off, the Savoy Group finds itself in the middle of a new heyday. This is because, arguably, bringing the hotel subtly up to date is in no sense a betrayal of its essential character. After all, the flagship hotel, on its foundation in 1889, was celebrated for its modernity - for its "ascending rooms" (lifts), the first in London, which enabled Richard D'Oyly Carte to charge the same for rooms on the top floor as on the ground; for its 60 bathrooms, a staggering number for the time, distributed among its 200 rooms.

In-room fax machines, British and American sockets, flawless air-conditioning - these are the present-day equivalent of the en suite bathroom: at first an exotic rarity, in no time an indispensable necessity. Ramn Pajares, stealthily, is moving towards the goal of hotels that are as modern as they are special.

"There are two ways of thinking about the Savoy Group hotels," says Hilary Rubinstein. "Either you can see them as imperishable parts of our heritage which should not be tampered with at all, or else you believe that there should be innovations which some don't accept." Two ways - but paradoxically only the latter gives the hotels a hope of surviving with their essential character intact.