Posted February 10, 2005
On a recent trip to London I stupidly stayed at Ian Schrager's thoroughly annoying, formerly hyper-trendy Sanderson hotel, which features interiors tricked out by Philippe Starck to disguise the fact that the rooms are teeny. In the middle of the night, in the pitch-black darkness, I bumped into some painfully elegant glass shelves that were awkwardly situated in the narrow passageway to the bathroom. To add insult to injury, in the morning a promised wake-up call never came. If only I had Brookstone's new Microbeam travel alarm clock, which not only has a coolly glowing green backlit LCD display, but turns into a high-beam LCD flashlight the instant you pick it up. It's a two-in-one solution to the two problems I experience at, come to think of it, a lot of hotels (not just Schrager's): bruises from bumping into things in dark, unfamiliar spaces, and paranoia (justified or not) about oversleeping because of missed wake-up calls.

$35 at Brookstone, 20 57th St., at Fifth Ave., 212-245-1405, brookstone.com.

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• From the Feb 10, 2005 issue of New York