Everyday Luxury

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It all started with an elegant little silver coffeepot on her breakfast tray every morning at the Excelsior Hotel in Florence, Italy. The young American woman, who worked in the fashion industry and was there to see the new collections, so admired the design, the function, the liquid beauty of the diminutive item, that she received one as a gift. She was engaged to be married and thought it a wonderful wedding present. The year was 1962.

By 1988 Ginger Kilbane had raised a family in Darien and was newly divorced. “I was reinventing myself, the idea for Hôtel Silver was germinating all those years, and I just started the business. How do you learn to ride a two-wheel bike? You just get on and ride!” she says.

Calling her new venture Hôtel Silver, Ginger returned to Europe, scouring England, France and Italy for vintage pieces from the grand hotels, steamship lines, railroads, restaurants and cafés. She named her business after the generic term for the hard-wearing silver-plated nickel service pieces used in the hospitality industry.

Hôtel Silver made its retail debut in a small display case in what was then the Good Food Store in Darien. Just in time for the 1990 holiday season, Ginger was invited to open her first boutique on the coveted seventh floor of Bergdorf Goodman in New York. A gleaming anchor of the boutique promenade eighteen years and counting, Hôtel Silver is dazzling.

“It’s like a candy store,” she enthuses, referring to the abundance of enticing trays, teapots, cutlery and bowls massed together, reflecting the light off one another, in mind-boggling, myriad shapes and sizes, set dramatically against Ginger’s favorite wall color and backdrop, an earthy, rich mushroom. The shimmering boutique has a devoted following, from the gentleman from Texas who purchased a pair of rolling meat trolleys (think roast beef at Simpson’s in London) at $32,000 each, filled them with ice and used them as poolside rolling bars, to the lovely lady who comes in periodically and carefully selects a single spoon ($22) to add to her collection.

What is so compelling about an old utensil, the dimpled trays, a stout teapot?

“The best of all worlds is that they’ve had a life of their own,” says Ginger. Even though she replates and restores every acquisition, the wear, she explains, is under the silver. “I have the best plater in London,” she notes. “He leaves things in the tank a long time. He loves to work on good, old pieces. We triple-plate.”

She prefers items from the late nineteenth century to the 1950s, and the simpler, the better. “I don’t buy something just because it has a name on it,” she says. “I buy it because it’s unornamented, feels good in the hand. It’s all about the shape.