The Mystery of Love Motels
There aren’t enough escape routes in a day to make you forget you’re staring at a screen with your Gmail tab open in the background, bills to pay, subscription-service trials to cancel, and articles about burnout to read. This stark, LED-lit scene is painted to offer up the next: sunset-pink clouds, glittering roses, and an invitation to sign the guest book of A Pretty Cool Hotel Tour’s fantasy site.
The tour is a project started by Margaret and her husband Corey, two LA-based photographers and filmmakers who fell in love with love motels and their themed rooms. It started with the Madonna Inn, the pink palace off California’s Highway 101, and deepened from there.
Margaret, also known as A Pretty Cool Girl on Instagram, hadn’t realized places like Madonna Inn existed, motels where textures are lush, tubs are heart-shaped, and casino-like rooms absorb you via no windows and mirrors that reflect your face onto other mirrors.
“I fell down an internet rabbit hole of googling as much as I could about theme rooms, fantasy rooms, adult-only rooms,” Margaret says. “I hadn’t heard of anyone going to these places.”
Last summer, the couple decided to take a trip around the Midwest to see other places similar to the Madonna Inn like Cove Haven, the Poconos couples resort and home of the Champagne Tower Tub. Photos of the trip that Margaret posted piqued her followers’ curiosity about these fantasy rooms and the idea for A Pretty Cool Hotel Tour was born.
The project documents love motels around the county, with a hotel map, and a channel of video tours. So far, there are three episodes of Margaret and Corey visiting Cove Haven, a very unexpected selection of themed rooms in an otherwise average-looking Best Western in Galena, Illinois, and New Jersey’s Gallery Holiday Motel.
The videos are funny and sweet, highlighting the beauty of these occasionally shabby but dazzling roadside palaces. You’ll understand when you watch them, but Margaret and Corey give new energy to these motels that are not usually captured very well on the internet. They do so with a perfect balance of “Look at this!” mixed with a little honest hesitancy if a place looks dingier it should.
In spite of the shared heart-shaped jacuzzi, there’s a difference between Cove Haven, a longtime resort with things like ice sculpting for couples and karaoke, and a by-the-hour sex motel. For Margaret, part of the project’s essence is detective work, trying to figure out how many of these places—particularly when they don’t have much of an internet presence—stay in business.
“Every single place we go to, I say, ‘How is this open?’” she asks. “I have no idea. Even Cove Haven, I want them to be busier! Yes, their weekends are busy and their summers are busy, but with how amazing that place is, I want them to just be pretty booked out. They deserve it.”
She mentions the instance of Kacey Musgraves reviving a photo studio in LA’s Koreatown, Tom’s One Hour Photo, that offered Glamour Shots-esque portraits straight out of the 1990s. “If a celebrity were to come along and be like, ‘These rooms are amazing, you should vacation here,’ I feel like suddenly there could be a resurgence of people staying in these places.”
“I keep thinking, at some point, will they kind of go viral in the way that Instagram traps do, that way tons of them will get business again,” Margaret says.
The love-motel aesthetic occupies that strange half-reality that certain Instagram design tropes do, where they look really appealing on a screen, but for a lot of people used to carpetless rooms, lots of natural light, and contemporary cleanness, maybe not so much in person. To stay in an adult motel, even for a few hours, is to commit to the knowledge of years of people’s body fluids and the feeling of your wet feet on carpet. Margaret says she can’t fully recommend staying in some of the places they visit.
“I tell people if you’re ok with the fact that you might want to wash the tub or you might want to bring your own pillow, then are you gonna go stay there?” she says. “It’s really hard to find the people who are like, ‘Whoa, yes, I’m actually gonna stay there.’ Unless you find a really good one like Cove Haven where I think anybody could stay there, and enjoy it and find the good in it.”
I used to think that because I loved these sorts of places so much, saying anything remotely negative about them would dispel the magic and bring too much light to the obscured and romantic dark corners. But it’s maybe respecting this niche of wild roadside hospitality more to acknowledge that, yes, sometimes these rooms can be both magical and a little dirty. Maybe there’s a way to keep them mostly intact while still bringing them into this decade.
During our chat, Margaret and I talk about how many of these businesses don’t have much of an internet presence.
“That’s why I feel like, are they sketchy?” she says. “Because they’re not trying to get business [on the internet] so clearly they’re getting business somehow. Is it really just random road trippers that happen upon these places? I want to ask questions, but I’m afraid it’ll ruin the magic.”
Love motels are, by and large, very mysterious. It’s inherent in their often drab exteriors that hold unexpected romantic hedonism within. There aren’t many physical remembrances of a not-so-distant past; seeing a themed motel feels a little like passing by a payphone. If you were to pick up the phone, you might disappear into another dimension.
Margaret remembers a front-desk woman from one of the motels they visited. “She was like, ‘We’re on Facebook, we’re on Instagram! Here’s our card!’ I left, and they actually aren’t on Instagram or Facebook,” she says. “They literally have a card with their social links and they don’t work, they don’t exist. I was just like, should I email her and let her know that they actually don’t have social media?”
In some instances, she’ll reach out to these motels offering free content for their social media in the form of photos and blog posts, and they’ll say, basically, no thanks.
“It’s just like, but why?” Margaret says with a laugh. “I haven’t figured out the mystery, which is probably why I want to go to these places. I still want to understand why because I’m offering free work, why do you not want it?”
This enigmatic quality is the uniting theme of A Pretty Cool Hotel Tour. She talks about a chain of motels in Miami (given the beautifully semi-corporate name of Executive Fantasy) with, perplexingly, 10 locations within a close drive of each other. On the hotel’s site, they emphasize rooms with a “discreet entrance” and a “private garage,” along with a patented sex chair (“love chair”) bolted down in each room.
“Older generations are different about sex in general, so I actually get them being like, ‘We need a private garage, we wouldn’t want our children or friends to know we’re going a sex motel,’ even if they’re married,” Margaret says. “But younger generations are way more open about sex…I don’t think they care as much about being discreet.”
She and her husband illuminate these rooms, and also, most importantly, make these places look very fun while doing so. They are, after all, truly adult playgrounds.
During their video tour of the Cove Haven resorts, viewers watch them play in the empty arcade, join in a game of bingo, and do a photoshoot with a resort photographer. (“Welcome to my time machine,” John the photographer says, escorting the couple into his studio.)
It’s all tender and funny and lightheartedly romantic. At one point, Corey karaokes a cover of “Can’t Help Falling In Love” that’s so delicate it makes me, a person who isn’t married to him, tear up.
Next on A Pretty Cool Hotel Tour’s channel, episodes for a not-just-any Days Inn in Coralville, Iowa, and a trip to Florida’s Miami Princess Hotel are coming up. Down the line, they want to visit Idaho, which “weirdly has a lot of incredible themed hotels,” she says.
Their guest book comments indicate that people are enchanted by them, the videos, and the heart-shaped tubs. “Thank you for filling the hotel shaped hole in my heart,” Nick from San Clemente writes. And Tammy from Bellingham posts, “You two came along just when we remembered our love for roadside attractions and funky hotels. We love how open and genuine you two are in videos and you appeal to our whole family!”
At one of the Cove Haven resorts, Margaret opens the door for us to their in-suite pool, surrounded by mirrors and a wallpaper tableau of an East Coast beach.
“We don’t know what time it is, we don’t know what day it is, we don’t know what year it is,” she tells the camera. “You’re in your own world here. We don’t know that the world outside is even continuing. It’s a great feeling.”
All photos courtesy of Margaret and Corey. Follow A Pretty Cool Hotel Tour on Instagram!
February 19, 2019
In "Features"