Pretty pots of nail polish may not quite be what we had in mind yesterday when we asked what secrets the doormen at the The Dorchester could tell us, but anyways. These pictures make us happy so we thought we had to share.

We were privy to a tour of the new (relatively – it opened last year) spa recently, and were utterly enchanted by the manicure room.

Central 214

After partying at the Greenville Avenue St. Patrick’s Day Parade on March 13, you can stumble over to the nearby Hotel Palomar Dallas for more Irish-themed shenanigans.

The hotel’s restaurant, Central 214, will go green for St. Paddy’s Day. Everything from the water flowing out the fountains to the beer will be green. Central 214 will also keep the party going on its patio, where you can munch on brats, hot dogs, chicken and beef while listening to Irish music.

As a longtime literary haven, the Algonquin was early on the hotel loan-a-Kindle trend, and now they’re stepping their bookishness up yet another notch. Guests at the Algonquin can choose between a Kindle or a Sony reader to use during their stay (free of charge.)

But that’s not all. Guests will have even more books to choose from as the hotel has struck a new partnership with the Harper Perennial imprint.

Harper Perennial will provide a fresh batch new titles and classics to the hotel each month. Upcoming titles available include The Secret Lives of People in Love by Simon Van Booy, and Oscar Wilde’s The Model Millionaire.

Do you want to get our attention? Send us an email with the words “penis festival” in the subject heading and we’re all ears (or is it eyes?)

The Matsuri restaurant inside The Maritime Hotel has crafted a special menu around the annual Japanese springtime celebration of fertility, The Penis Festival. The festival is a legit thing, having started originally with prostitutes praying to a small penis-venerating shrine for protection against STDS.

Today, The Penis Festival takes over the streets of Kawasaki during the first week of April where the crowds gather to see “phallic see-saws, penis carving contests, and edible sweetmeat manhood replicas all in the name of fertility or or ‘Kanamara Matsuri.’

With the opening just two weeks away on March 25, we can now report that the W Vieques Island Retreat and Spa has opening packages starting at $359 a night. Considering our disappointment that regular rates were $339 last time we checked, we’re happy that the hotel—the first W retreat and spa in North America—has decided to give us a little more bang for our buck.

Not surprisingly for a property that calls its restaurant miX on the Beach and its rooms ’sand-sational’, the opening package has a snazzy name too—it’s the Surrender to Your Senses package. Here’s what you get in return:

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Yesterday our tipster enlightened us on the catwalk at the Mandarin Oriental Barcelona. Today, he returns with a brief review of the brand-new W Barcelona which is celebrating its official opening today. (It actually opened back in October.) Here’s what our tipster thought as he passed through.

The W is located on the waterfront, basically a straight shot down from Las Ramblas. However, to physically get there is not that easy – you have to follow the road that passes Barceloneta and keep going until you circle around the inner harbor and get to the hotel.

Once you pass Barceloneta, and in the immediate area around the hotel, there is absolutely nothing at all

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The owners of the World Center Hotel hope so.

This new hotel from the Club Quarters brand directly overlooks the construction on the site where the Twin Towers once stood and they are actively using their location–as a memorial site and a construction site–to market their hotel rooms for both business travelers and tourists.

The AP reports that guest rooms have to floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on the site and the hotel’s restaurant has an open-air patio from which guests have front row seats to the construction activity. Rooms have special soundproof windows to block out most of the construction noise and blackout shades to keep out the lights from the night construction.

It does seem