The Hip Hotels books are the travel guides of choice for style gurus and design devotees. Louise Eastmeets Herbert Ypma, the travel writer who has revolutionised hotel guide books.
It's a rainy Wednesday in Piccadilly, but Herbert Ypma looks as if he has just walked off the set of Lost. With his floppy, sun-bleached fringe, piercing blue eyes in a weathered brown face, faded white denim shirt and a pair of old Levi's held up with a belt of plaited rope, he looks not so much like an archetypal travel writer as he does like Clint Eastwood pretending to be a travel writer.
In fact, thanks to the series of hotel guides he founded eight years ago, Ypma - a Dutch native brought up in the US, Australia and Mexico - is one of the most influential players in the travel industry.
Worldwide sales of the 14 Hip Hotels books (including City, Escape and Budget and a compendium called simply Hip Hotels: Atlas) have passed two million. To dedicated fans of the mini-break, Hip Hotels is the bible; for the armchair traveller poring over the beautiful photographs, they're holiday porn.
"How I originally explained it to the publishers was this," Ypma says. "Over here, you've got a coffee-table book; nice package visually, with nothing remotely practical in it. Then over here, you have a guide book with lots of practical information, but it looks like a dog's breakfast. My point was what happens if you take the practicality of the guide book and the production values of a coffee-table book and you blend them?"
The format is much-imitated now, but when Hip Hotels: City was first dispatched to booksellers, in 1999, they had no idea where it should go and stocked it not just in travel but also in the architecture and design sections.
But while it may have been hard to place, it certainly wasn't hard to sell. "Big numbers," Ypma says matter-of-factly. "Straight away."
While clearly no stranger to hubris, Ypma is convincingly modest when it comes to the reason for his success. "It's relatively logical that somebody would be interested in a hotel which is both aesthetically pleasing and individual or different. Fifty years ago, when you went to France, it was French food, French currency, French way of life, so when you ended up in a Hilton at the end of the day, it was a nice balance, because you'd had enough of all that Frenchness.
"Now we're in a situation where every country in the world has the same cars, the same hotels, the same shops. There's a Boots chemist in every shopping mall in Thailand and a Body Shop in Ookykanooky Creek, Arkansas. So now, when you travel, you think, look, if I'm going to go to Thailand, I want to stay somewhere that feels like Thailand."
In a moment of perfect synchronicity, Hip Hotels launched just as the cheap flight revolution kicked in. Ryanair and EasyJet could fly you there and Ypma would tell you where to stay when you arrived. Getting Hip status virtually guarantees hotels a stream of cashed-up, style-conscious holidaymakers, while countless little-known islands and obscure European cities have suddenly become "destinations" because Ypma has highlighted a quirky hotel that was formerly a sponge factory (Hotel Bratsera in Hydra, Greece) or a soap merchants ('t Sandt in Antwerp, Belgium).
In recent years, the combination of cheap flights and broadening horizons has resulted in short breaks to long-haul destinations. "I was shooting a very remote place in Kenya. I'm talking seriously remote," Ypma recalls. "And there was a couple there from London. So I said, are you here for the week? And they said, no, we came for the weekend. That's pretty good."
Or, from an environmentalist's perspective, pretty horrendous. Quite apart from Ypma's personal carbon footprint, which must be the size of a yeti's, it could be argued that his books contribute directly to the rise of global warming by encouraging ever more travel to increasingly far-flung destinations.
"You picked a bit of a subject there for me." Ypma says, a little warily.
"My father was a geologist, and you could not convince him about global warming at all. We know it's getting warmer, but, scientifically, what you have to prove is that it's because of our pollution, and that's very hard to do, because we don't have enough data. There is no model.
"I'm sure pollution is contributing to it, and I think it's good for people to be a bit more aware of waste. I don't have a car in the city. I have a bike. I'm religious when it comes to recycling. When I travel, I travel with one camera bag and another teeny little bag. You can do all that and feel fairly comfortable that you're not wasting unnecessarily. A couple of years ago I was checking out of a hotel the same day Sharon Stone was checking in, and she had nine Louis Vuitton trunks in reception, for a two-week trip. That's just a stupid indulgence."
Even if he disputes our contribution to global warming, Ypma is well aware of people's growing desire to fly less. His latest book, Hip Hotels: UK is a collection of 31 rural getaways, from Georgian mansions to Scottish castles. With screening rooms, infinity pools and honesty bars offered as standard, these hotels are a far cry from Fawlty Towers.
"The traditional mode was: 'Oh, I'm sorry, sir. Breakfast finishes at 10.' Well, what if you're drinking red wine and playing billiards until four in the morning and now it's three in the afternoon and you feel like scrambled eggs? It's recognising the realities of the new urban person and applying them to a country setting."
Regarding Ireland, and its new generation of country getaways, such as Bellinter House in Co Meath, Ypma says enthusiastically: "It's time for me to go to Ireland. When it gets to critical mass, off I go, and it's easy to see things are changing rapidly. I'm getting pictures from places in Ireland and thinking, wow, there's a lot of funky stuff going on."
Despite the enormous success of the series, the production of the books is surprisingly small-scale and streamlined. "We can turn an entire book around from start to finish in half a year, including me doing the travelling and photography and writing." Ypma's itinerary takes a month to put together and is, Ypma says, "like a military schedule. If one thing goes wrong, the whole thing collapses." He had to return to the Maldives four times (popping back between trips to India, Sri Lanka and Europe) before he could take photographs without rain.
Once he's on the move, Ypma's routine rarely varies. Usually travelling solo, he checks in at noon, takes photos using the afternoon light, changes into his one bespoke linen suit and descends for dinner, bringing with him a Mont Blanc pen and a Smythson notebook. Over dinner he writes up the hotel while it's fresh in his mind. By noon the next day he's at the next hotel.
What is astonishing is not that Ypma travels like this but that he never stops. Ever. "The longest I ever stay still is two weeks. Two weeks is a lot for me, because I travel so much and have always travelled so much. Travel is not just second nature to me, it's first nature. Staying put for a couple of weeks, that's second nature."
What is even more astonishing is that Ypma has a French partner and two children, aged six and four. Although he has an office in London, it's Paris he now considers home. "At the very beginning it would worry me. My son would be hanging on to my leg as I was walking out the door, saying: 'Don't go.' But I went to a psychiatrist and said, you know, this really disturbs me, and she said, well, as human beings we get used to everything. It won't be traumatic any more in the future as long as they know you're coming back.
"The upside is that when I'm in Paris I'm Mr Mom. I get them up, I take them to school, I take them to the park, I put them in the bath. When I'm around I'm really around. There are a lot of fathers out there who leave at 7.30 in the morning and get back after the kids are in bed and who only see their kids at the weekend."
Next up for Ypma is a revised version of Hip Hotels: Asia; a mini-Hip Hotels: Atlas and a couple of TV programmes. But the project he's really excited about is Hip Hotels: Kids. "It's not a book about hotels that are great for kids, it's a book about hotels which are brilliant for adults and also happen to be great for kids. There's a big difference."
For Ypma, there's no question of slowing down, much less of delegating the work. "Part of the success of the book - and if you quote this, you have to quote it in context - is that I'm becoming the Martha Stewart of travel. People trust what I'm saying even if they don't necessarily agree with it. I think it's because all I'm saying about each hotel is: I've been there, I've photographed it, I've written about it." And if you're Herbert Ypma, that's enough to make it hip.
Hip Hotels: UK by Herbert Ypma is published by Thames & Hudson, £18.95 in UK