Foreign: Cyprus PoMotel

I wrote this whilst trying to waste 4 hours, stuck at Larnaca airport for a flight home. You may wish, dear reader, to aim off slightly therefore, and, in so doing, redact a hint of impotent fury from your interior monologue.

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As another EU Presidency country, I've traveled to Cyprus a couple of times to go to meetings and wear a suit and be British. 

Owing to a delayed flights on the way out (this time: freezing fog at Heathrow), I didn't get chance to look around Nicosia and see what the place is like. All I did see of Cyprus was from a window of the coach. In September, it looked like a sun-blasted quarry, with blobular white Moss Eisley housing on the horizon. But in December, the place was much greener, and actually looked a bit like England in summer. I can see why our agéd chavs come here to retire and deflate and go orange. 

But perhaps the hotel made up for all the delays. The Larnaca Hilton (not to be confused with the Larnaca Park Hilton, of course, that would be stupid. Like our coach driver), is an externally unlovely bit of 60s concrete.

Much more excitingly, it was refurbed in the late 90s in the Postmodernist styling of an early bit of Canary Wharf. 

We Brits stopped doing PoMo in about 1990, when we ran out of boom money, and all started enjoying negative equity and high interest rates. When we restarted building, we'd decided that the 80s were terribly vulgar, and it made more sense to build curvy white and glass things, like the Germans did in the 1920s. Anyway, our recession clearly didn't affect our European cousins in such a way, hence the Corporate PoMo style seems to have flourished onwards for many more years.

The arcade of 'luxury' shops is strange mix of travertine arches, twiddly metalwork and a suspended ceiling with spotlights. 

The entrance to the bar is flagged by some Corinthian columns and triple-helix Hippocratic uplighters. 

The main lift atrium is particularly fun - towers like stacked Doric columns of banded stone rise up to a glass canopy, above a shiny marble floor of meaningless hieroglyphs. Two large metal gates denote where the entrance to the lifts isn't - the gates are simply decorative, and the lift doors are round the other side. 

Some massive scrolling pretends to hold up the floor above. 

I was delighted at the silliness of some rustic detail nearby - a row of terracotta roofing tiles along to top of a wooden screen. 

You might think that it's entirely in keeping, a hint of Cypriot peasant hut near a Grecian temple.

But that would be to miss the point of this Hilton's PoMo. The design is not supposed to look like something of local significance. Rather, the hotel is supposed to look like the ones in America (did). The architecture's itinerary is Greece to Cyprus via Chicago.

Much of the UK's Corporate Grecian PoMo has been refurbed away, but I was pleased to find another trace of Yuppie aspiration - a ubiquity of 'Executive' bedrooms, flattering every guest into feeling like a double-breasted Thatcherite trader.