No better illustration of the inherent design problems of Dublin's new Four Seasons hotel can be provided than the remark made recently by a company spokeswoman. "I'm afraid you can't speak to the architect," she explained, "because, you see, he is in California."
Frankly, that is where the hotel belongs, too; it certainly should not have been built in Ballsbridge, or indeed anywhere else in this country.
While the architect responsible, Mr Mike Chun, of the practice Wimberley Allison Tong and Goo, repeatedly visited the site, acquired from the RDS on the corner of Merrion and Simmonscourt Roads, there is precious little evidence of this in the finished result.
In fact, the first and greatest drawback to the Four Seasons is precisely that it makes no visible concession to its surroundings but looms ominously over them, looking like nothing so much as the bastard offspring of Citizen Kane's Xanadu. Quite what the intended style of the structure is cannot be easily deduced; the publicity material produced by the Four Seasons group claims the hotel "combines both Georgian and Victorian architectural styles".
Meanwhile Mr Chun, to whom it is possible to speak, albeit by long-distance telephone, summarises his work as "an interpretation of the Georgian as well as a bit of the Victorian and somewhat contemporised".
As a blend, this is both unusual and unhappy, especially since disparate elements from other periods have been added to the mix, producing a squat portecochere on the ground floor, Moghul-esque domes above, innumerable hard-edged buttresses around every side - described by Mr Chun as "undulations in and out" - and a skyline on which pediments and pitched roofs are at war with each other.
The exterior also suffers from a proliferation of ugly PVC-frame windows, hardly the apogee of architectural excellence or five-star luxury.
What makes this work all the more disappointing is an awareness that the Four Seasons group, which originated in Canada 40 years ago, is not synonymous with poor-quality design.
Over the past decade the company has opened several outstanding properties. In Milan it carefully restored the 15th-century Convent of St Elizabeth on the Via Gesu to create an exquisite hotel. In New York, I.M. Pei was hired to design a new structure in central Manhattan that immediately became recognised as one of the finest additions to the city's building stock during the 1990s.
This will certainly never be the case with the Four Seasons in Dublin, despite a sum of about £70 million having been spent on its construction.
The publicity already quoted also insists that the hotel blends "elegantly into its surroundings". Nothing could be further from the truth. In an area where most properties rise no more than two or three storeys, the Four Seasons incorporates six floors and is therefore considerably taller than any immediate neighbours. The hotel shows scant regard for its surroundings, in a manner not seen in new Four Seasons properties elsewhere. Mr Chun regards Ballsbridge as "a neighbourhood in transition" and claims the hotel he has designed has managed to "straddle the present and the future".
If this area of Dublin does come to have a predominantly commercial character in the years ahead, he can claim a share of the responsibility. The sheer mass of the building certainly does not conform, except in the most superficial elements of design, to the residential properties in the immediate vicinity.
The Four Seasons sits on, and occupies approximately half of, a 3.5-acre site. Into this relatively small space has been squeezed just under 7,000 square metres of accommodation, including 259 guest rooms and suites, a restaurant and cafe, a private dining-room, a bar, several reception areas, two ballrooms, conference rooms, a swimming pool and health spa and, of course, all the sundry service facilities.
Tellingly, the new Dublin hotel is much bigger than many of those opened in recent years by the Four Seasons group elsewhere in Europe: the Milan operation has barely 100 bedrooms, that in Berlin less than 200 and the recent Istanbul outlet - another architectural delight located in what was originally a jail - a mere 80-odd.
The developers here have crammed too much into too little. Inevitably, the outcome is bulky and lumpen; like some steroid-fuelled body-builder, the Four Seasons looks about to explode out of its walls. That permission was granted to build such an outsize block here must be considered another error on the part of the local authority planners. There are many other incidental reasons the hotel appears so unsatisfactory.
The granite-clad Merrion Road frontage, for example, which is meant to ape the style of the adjacent early 20th-century neo-classical facades of the RDS, includes a set of monumental steps leading up to grand entrance doors.
These are so close to the railings and roadway that not only do they look absurdly pompous but they will not be used; guests must come through the main entrance off Simmonscourt Road.
And that entrance is surrounded not by landscaped grounds, which might help to relieve the heavy weight of the building, but by the inevitable Tarmacadamed surfaces to permit spaces for 50 vehicles, despite the presence of an underground car-park.
Internally, the hotel's appearance - courtesy of Chicago-based decorator Frank Nicholson - is no better. Fashion at the moment is undergoing a 1980s revival, and the Four Seasons' rooms might have been devised to accommodate the casts of Dynasty and Dallas.
The interiors suffer from the decorating equivalent of the over-endowed shoulder pads which were such a feature of those soap operas. There is something hopelessly dated about the abundance of damask-covered walls, Italian marble pilasters, gaudy patterned carpets and curtains so ornately draped and gathered that at times it is scarcely possible to see the PVC windows behind them.
Walking through rooms bedecked in reproduction Georgian furniture, it becomes apparent that Mr Nicholson has a weakness for overly-gilded frames, bright colours and contrasting patterns. He describes the result as "a Georgian-style sanctuary", but it is neither authentically Georgian in style nor in any way restful.
The Four Seasons' interior manages the feat of simultaneously showing that a great deal of money has been spent while looking terribly cheap. The backs of the dining chairs in the smaller of the two ballrooms, for example, are edged in thick bands of heavy gold cord encased in tubes of clear plastic.
Visitors to resorts such as Palm Beach and Las Vegas will be familiar with this style of hotel decoration in which extravagant use of expensive materials attempts to conceal paucity of imaginative design.
The Four Seasons group is not a mass-market, cut-price hotel chain. It prides itself on the quality of the product offered to customers; the company's policy brochure describes its "design objective" as the provision of "an environment that is refined, stylish and beautiful".
None of these adjectives could be applied to the new property in Dublin, a city which, despite the hotel boom of the past decade, has seen few venues of real merit and originality emerge. The Clarence, Merrion and Morrison are the only ones that spring to mind.
The Four Seasons had an opportunity to join this meagre band but opted instead for a Georgian-Victorian-contemporised hybrid. This latest addition to the country's architectural stock provides another garish manifestation of the maxim that money and taste are rarely found together.