I thought I would take the liberty to post an arcticle recently written about an Australian connection to Buenos Aires’ boutique hotel boom. With over 200 boutique hotels, there is no other city on the planet that can match Buenos Aires (BA) in the small hotel stakes. Competetion is feirce, and with Chimu Adventures we can get you into pretty much any of them. Our Buenos Aires stopover is a very popular tour and can be ammended to fit in any of the below mentioned hotels, or any that takes your fancy!. Our well travelled staff are on hand to help you make the decision! From the Finisterra 248 to Home, to Own to the Art hotel – we have you covered. That and the rest of Argentina.

Joel Gibson explores Palermo Viejo, the former ghetto that has become the hottest barrio in Buenos Aires.

It was a crowded house of a different kind that led one of Australia’s favourite musicians to become a Buenos Aires hotelier. As they gathered in the Argentine capital to see two friends marry in 2001, Crowded House bass player Nick Seymour and his fellow guests had trouble finding low-key but hip and comfortable digs that could cater for them all.

Former Depeche Mode sound engineer Tom Rixton was to marry Patricia O’Shea, the manager of a Dublin restaurant owned by U2 frontman Bono’s brother, where Seymour was a regular and had introduced the couple.

So the guest list at the wedding was a motley crew of music industry types who had grown out of trashing hotels – or were too polite to ever start. They were accustomed to the boutique haunts of Covent Garden, Darlinghurst and St Kilda; in Seymour’s words, they were “music business people who had stayed in a lot of hotels but really wanted a creative, home vibe”.

Accommodation aside, Seymour liked what he saw in the city that bills itself as the design capital of South America.

He was inspired by its live music scene, impressed by the brazenness of its famous transvestites who strut at the city’s notorious “ladyboy park” and touched by the monument to tens of thousands of “disappeared” political dissidents. And he saw plenty of similarities with Australia, where he grew up and toured with his brother, Mark, later the frontman of Hunters and Collectors.

In Argentina, as in Australia, even city dwellers cling to a rural idyll for their national myth. North America has its cowboys on ranches, Australia its drovers on the world’s largest stations and Argentina has gauchos on majestic estancias. “[The gauchos] are down-to-earth types and, some might say, kind of feral. But if you grew up in Australia, you really know where they’re coming from,” Seymour says.

But it was leafy Palermo Viejo, the former ghetto just north-west of the centre of Buenos Aires, that really appealed to Seymour. With its vintage Ford Falcons and legalised graffiti murals, the area where Jorge Luis Borges grew up writing about knife fights and street gangs experienced a revival in the 1990s on the back of a boom in the TV and film production industries. After the national economy all but collapsed in 2001, the barrio is thriving again with an atmosphere reminiscent of New York’s East Village, Sydney’s Surry Hills or Melbourne’s Fitzroy.

“They’re all culture vultures,” Seymour says of the Portenos, as the city’s urbane inhabitants are known. “They’re highly cultured people in exile, just like Australians.”

He liked Palermo so much he decided to put down roots and hatched a plan with O’Shea. “We had this hare-brained idea to start a little hotel in the neighbourhood,” Seymour says.

Eight years later, the sides of Buenos Aires’s buses declare it “the city of design” and its reputation for tango, horsey fashion and faux-Parisian barrios such as Recoleta, home of the opulent cemetery that houses Evita’s tomb, is being eclipsed by the buzz about its nightlife.

Palermo’s leafy grid of streets has been divided by realtors and hipsters into three districts – “Soho”, “Hollywood” and “Queens” – and they are alive from dusk until dawn.

Borges, Argentina’s renowned man of letters, once complained of not feeling a real man because he had never been in a fight, though he grew up watching razor gangs at war on Palermo’s streets.

But Borges was no fan of football or the gaucho myth or Evita either, making him a most unusual Argentinian. “He was much more popular overseas than he was here,” says an Argentine friend who lives below Borges’s old apartment. “He was so English. If you got in the elevator together he would say, ‘Top of the morning to you!’.”

Now the slum of Borges’s youth is giving the city a reputation for the worldliness he espoused, rather than the traditional Argentine pursuits he despised. At Osaka, celebrated chef Daniel Delgado Jitsuya fuses Peruvian and Japanese flavours in dishes such as fish anticucho with cilantro sauce. Some consider the staff snooty but a local friend rates what’s on the plate as “hands-down” BA’s best. The sesame-seared tuna is among the best we’ve eaten anywhere.

A few blocks away at La Cabrera, well-heeled locals drink champagne as they queue on the footpath for “al carbon”, beef slow-cooked over coals, a method that makes Argentinians the true kings of steak, even if it hurts to acknowledge it.

After waiting so long that we’re told to lay off the bubbles, we fall upon half a kilo of Kobe wagyu beef for about $20.

When dinner winds up about midnight, we find plenty of digestives on offer at 878, a bar masquerading as a plain doorway in a residential street. And at the notorious Club 69 on Thursday nights at Niceto nightclub, showgirls mix with drag queens and businessmen on a dancefloor full of Portenos with not a tango in sight. Argentina is a puzzling place that fancies itself as European and can put you in mind of Italy, France and Mexico as much as anywhere in South America.

Though O’Shea laments that Palermo Soho’s boho character has begun to change, the barrio remains the doorway to the “new” Buenos Aires and Home Hotel and others nearby, such as Bo Bo Hotel, have thrived as launchpads for those wanting to explore it.

It helps that these hotels are among the most impressive examples of modern design in the city. Home is designed around O’Shea and Rixton’s own collection of vintage wallpaper, teamed with polished concrete floors, sexy lighting and reupholstered vintage furniture from the area’s flea markets and second-hand dealers.

O’Shea writes and regularly updates the pocket-sized Home Guide, a sort of Lonely Planet for foodies and tragic aesthetes that ensures you won’t get caught on the wrong side of fashion. Rixton plays his impressive store of records on Friday nights in the pool garden during summer when guests wait for BA’s almost comically late nightlife to start.

Home’s customers are mostly from the US and Europe, with the number of Australians up about 15 per cent since Qantas started flying direct to Buenos Aires in November.

With a spa and staff too young to have learned the Porteno habit of curt service, the overall effect, Seymour reckons, is that of “a really well-appointed Australian beach house”.

Which is just the sort of place you wish you were after a night out in one of South America’s most hedonistic cities. Buenos Aires is a site to behold, and a must do for any lover of good cuisine and culture!

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