Hotels’ Holiday Finery Offers Ideas for All

For 10 days in November, Candy Havercroft and Debbie Gray hole up in a suite at the Newport Beach Marriott Hotel and Tennis Club and transform their room into a Santa’s workshop.

They surround themselves with imitation Christmas trees and wreaths, boxes piled high with ornaments and hundreds of red, gold and pink bows.

Then, like a couple of industrious elves, they steal out into the hotel and festoon the place with glittering trees, ropes of twinkling garland and pink poinsettia wreaths.

“People ask us if we ever get sick of Christmas. Never!” Havercroft says. “We love it. We thrive on it. I put up two trees in my own home, and Debbie puts up three in hers.”

Decking the halls of Orange County’s major hotels is not so different from decorating at home, say florists and decorators. Those in charge of spreading good will and glitter to hotel guests must have a keen eye for decorating, but most of the magic they create can easily be adapted to private residences. Home decorators can visit the spectacular displays in local hotels and make off with ideas to spruce up their abodes.

Many come to the Ritz-Carlton in Dana Point simply to ogle the opulent Christmas decorations.

This year, florists with Miles-Randolf in Laguna Hills used rich fabrics and tapestries to create Victorian-style decorations.

Along the banister of the main staircase, they have strung a lavish garland of thick gold coil and tapestry ribbon wrapped around greenery loaded with crystallized fruit, sparkling white dried flowers and cranberry-colored leaves.

On the mantel of the hotel’s massive fireplace, they’ve heaped an abundant harvest of huge pine cones, sugar-coated fruit and pomegranates, with falling cascades of gold, tapestry and crimson-colored ribbon.

The walls were hung with huge sprays of greenery, laden with red ribbon, imitation red grapes, berries, apples, gilded leaves and large red and frosted cranberry ornaments.

“Hotels often dictate the feeling they want to create, and this year they all wanted the traditional look, some more lush than others. They all went back to the reds and golds,” says Shirley Miles of Miles-Randolf, which also decorated the Four Seasons and Sheraton hotels in Newport Beach and other Orange County establishments.

The florists’ decorations illustrate that the simplest ideas can look the most elegant.

In the Ritz-Carlton’s cafe, for instance, they planted tall, curly willow branches in a bed of red poinsettias. To complete the illusion of a winter wonderland, they painted the branches white, sprinkled them with iridescent glitter and wrapped them in white twinkle lights.

“So many things you have in your back yard can be used for decorations,” says Miles, who teaches classes in holiday decorating.

The florists will transform a plain pine cone into a sparkling ornament by covering it in red glitter. They load dried flowers, painted white and dusted with clear glitter, on the boughs of their Christmas trees. Spray glue and glitter have proven indispensable to their decorations this season.

“We’re in an era of glitz,” Miles says. “If it’s done tastefully, it can be beautiful.”

She sends her students to fabric stores for the fine materials used in her hotel decorations.

Instead of ribbon, she cuts yards of lame and velvet into strips four to eight inches wide, using glue or stitching to finish the edges if the fabric frays.

“We made our garland from fabric because we wanted it to be more lush,” she says. “The fabrics are beautiful and they last. Plus, fabric bows require fewer decorations. Many people spend a lot of money on small ornaments. This reduces the number of ornaments you need. Your ornaments can be fewer, but richer. In the long run, you’ll save money.”

To outfit the Newport Beach Marriott for the holidays, Gray and Havercroft begin shopping for ornaments and decorations 10 months before Christmas.

“We have 21 trees to trim, and each one is different,” Gray says. They set up the trees throughout the hotel, in the main lobby, the ballroom, the atrium, View Room lounge and even one in the suite of a private guest who bought a tree fully trimmed.

Although the tree that stands in the lobby is bedecked with red bows and red and green ornaments, the two decorators often deviate from traditional Christmas colors. They’ve garnished a white tree in the View Room entirely in pink bows and balls, with small heart- and diamond-shaped mirrors and acrylic icicles.

“It looks like cotton candy,” Havercroft says.

Another white tree that stands in the alcove above the hotel atrium has black-and-gold Christmas balls, glittery black silk poinsettias, gold fans and big gold-and-black bows on every branch.

The pair’s chief frustration: guests who act like Grinches and steal ornaments off the trees. One tree covered in skinny mauve bows and frosted cranberry and pink balls had already lost three of its four white turtledoves before the women had finished decorating. And at a recent wedding, some unruly guests sprayed their cotton candy tree with Silly String, ruining some of the ornaments.

For home decorators who don’t have such worries, the women offer their first rule of tree trimming: “Use lots and lots of lights,” Gray says. They illuminate a standard 7-foot tree with no fewer than 1,200 white mini-lights, winding the strands up and down the branches so the interior of the tree glows.

“It makes the trees come alive,” Gray says.

They also favor lots of ornaments. Those who can’t afford many of the more expensive decorations should put their best ornaments forward at the focal points of the tree, and use the cheaper ornaments as filler, Gray says. They use Victorian cutout post cards and ribbons to conceal bare branches. For an inexpensive tree top, they glue together a cluster of large bows, leaving the long streamers to hang down the tree.

“They add a little extra oomph,” Gray says.

Those needing a lesson in color coordination can visit the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, where Tommy Farmer, assistant art director of the Entertainment Art Department at Disneyland, designs decorations to match each corner of the 1,174-room hotel.

In front of the Monorail entrance, he has placed futuristic wreaths with white boughs, silver and glass balls, mini-star garland and metallic herringbone ribbon.

Inside the Mandarin Bar stands an Oriental-style tree, with gold fans and clusters of bamboo shoots tied with gold cord.

Most decorators would frown on putting a forest green bow on a green spray, but Farmer makes it work with silver and gold balls.

“The silver and gold lightens it up,” he says.

A few decorating techniques used in hotels don’t work in private homes.

Borango Inc., a 75-year-old manufacturer of large-scale decorations based in San Francisco, occasionally gets requests from people wanting to buy their 8-foot deer made of manzanita branches, which inhabit the Disneyland Hotel and South Coast Plaza mall during the holidays.

“The only problem is they cost about $1,000 each,” says Greg Cunningham, one of Borango’s designers. “People don’t want to pay that for a Christmas decoration.”

Nor do they always want to follow the lead of professional designers.

“Last year we went too far,” Cunningham says. “We did a lot of things for hotels and department stores in sculptured metal. In one store, we put up a flying Pegasus. You tell me what that has to do with Christmas.”

Ambitious designers strayed so far from tradition, it was beginning to look a lot like chaos.

“This year, we’re going back to what the average Joe thinks of Christmas,” Cunningham says.