Kleptos at Claridge’s: What’s OK to Steal from the World’s Best Hotels?

You can’t take it with you? Tell that to a certain doyenne of New York and Palm Beach who keeps six bath towels from the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes in her linen closet. She’s not, to be clear, a woman who steals. She is not an anomaly, however. She is, in the finest hotels, practically an archetype.

For a certain kind of traveler, the souvenir has always been taken to another level. The designer toiletries are beneath them; what they want is something monogrammed, crested, and quietly unmistakable to anyone who knows. A corkscrew from Le Bristol on the bar. A robe from Claridge’s hanging in the bathroom. A pair of monogrammed pillowcases from the Peninsula Beverly Hills. The ultimate IYKYK flex. What’s acceptable to take depends on who you are, where you’re staying, and how much brio your burglary involves. For plenty of well-heeled travelers, the cachet of hotel merch you simply can’t buy anywhere else is worth flirting with a life of crime.

The hotels know. Of course they know. And the truly great ones have long since stopped pretending otherwise. Octavia Marginean-Tahiroglu, general manager of the St. Regis New York, notes that the hotel’s Irish linen “mysteriously ends up finding its way into guests’ suitcases” with remarkable regularity. “Thick, old-fashioned and quietly indulgent,” she says, “it is the perfect shaving strop, aftershave towel, or place to rest toiletries.”

At Hotel Sacher in Vienna, co-owner Alexandra Winkler has made her peace with a wandering wardrobe. “Our monogrammed slippers or bathrobes have a remarkable tendency to travel the world in our guests’ suitcases,” she says. “We prefer to see it as a compliment—a small piece of Sacher accompanying them home and serving as a lasting reminder of a memorable stay.”

No one, however, has leaned into the one-percent pinch so elegantly as Antonio Sersale, co-owner of Le Sirenuse in Positano. Having noticed that the hotel’s ashtrays had “a way of quietly checking out with our guests,” Sersale did not install cameras or confront departing luggage. He wrote a note. Each ashtray now comes accompanied by a small card informing the guest that should it find its way into a suitcase, the hotel won’t judge—it’ll simply applaud the good taste.

When travel and lifestyle writer Zachary Weiss was 11, he lived out his Home Alone fantasy at the Plaza—and departed with a pair of slippers, a bathmat, and a Do Not Disturb sign. “They’re a relic of the hotel’s previous chapter,” he says, referring to the Plaza’s hotly contested renovation years later, “and I assume the statute of limitations has run out by now.” It hadn’t occurred to him to feel guilty. It rarely does. These days his acquisitions are more considered; he collects shoe and laundry bags from every property, repurposing them at home to separate worn clothes from clean. Practical. Defensible. Though he does confess to one lapse: a beautiful leather hanger from a hotel he declines to name. “I still feel guilty about it,” he says.

For Pamela Murphy, founder of the luxury travel advisory Wanderist Travel, the impulse is less about theft than memory making. “It’s really about people wanting to collect that jet-set chic souvenir,” she says. “It’s a memento of where they were—they can use those cocktail napkins and tell a story when they have a party at home.” And besides, she points out, the admiration runs both ways. “If a hotel does something really well, it'’ actually the highest form of flattery—somebody taking a robe, a towel, an ashtray, a mug.”

Martha Stewart recently admitted, “I take one thing: shower caps,” and Cornelia Guest told T&C, “It used to be shower caps, but most aren’t so good anymore.” Ivy Getty copped to taking slippers. Karl-Anthony Towns walks off with dental kits. Anna Sui helps herself the Q-Tips, and her niece, the actress Chase Sui Wonders, notes that, “In my worst moment, I stole a pillow.”

Even the most disciplined among us are not immune—least of all, it turns out, novelists. Natasha Lester, the author of The Chateau on Sunset, insists she has never indulged in actual theft—well, not really. The single exception: a dozen sheets of personalized stationery from her suite at the Chateau Marmont, where her book is based, embossed “In Residence: Natasha Lester.” “Of course I took all of it with me,” she says. The one thing she’s coveted but never dared: the teapots. Baglioni Hotel Luna. The Ritz Paris. The Savoy. “I’m not sure they’d survive the journey back to Australia,” she admits, “so I’ve never tried.”

Lucy Foley, the author of the forthcoming Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel, claims a more professional motive. “I came to this particular vice honestly—through research,” she says. “It’s practically a professional requirement when you write crime.” While scouting locations at Badrutt’s Palace in St. Moritz, she came home with the hotel’s letter paper, embossed in duck egg and powder blue, a technically permitted souvenir, she’s careful to note. It has sat untouched in a drawer ever since. “Far too beautiful to actually write on,” she says. “I take it out occasionally just to look at it—like the slightly eccentric magpie I am.”

Not everyone has the nerve to follow through. Sheila Yasmin Marikar, author of the recently released novel Incidentals, admits to a lifetime of eyeing without quite committing. “The nifty coffee maker at Reschio and the handmade ceramic cups that came with it; the tasseled cushions at Beaverbrook Townhouse and the drapes that matched—all loot that I might’ve stashed in my suitcase had I the comportment or compartments to pull it off,” she says. What she lacks in boldness herself, however, she’s witnessed in others. At a five-star hotel in Tbilisi, a fellow writer offered an unsolicited solution when Marikar fretted about her natural wine haul breaking in transit: “Take the towels. Wrap them around the bottles. I take all the towels, all the time.” Marikar was unmoved by the logistics—“Who has space for that?”—but she draws her own line elsewhere: slippers. “A fresh set is so easy to pack,” she says. “It’s almost a crime not to go home with them.” Her favorites: the plush ones from JOALI Maldives, and a velvety set from Rosewood Hong Kong.

Actor, director, and author Griffin Dunne remembers his father, the late journalist and social chronicler Dominick Dunne, as a man of refined criminal instincts. “Stealing bathrobes was beneath my father’s taste for larceny,” he says. “But in his travels through Europe, when times were good, he’d pocket an ashtray from the Ritz in Paris, Claridge’s in London, the Grand in Rome—no hotel was safe.” The habit outlived him in an unexpected way. “When he died and I offered his closest friends to take a memento, every one of them asked for an ashtray,” Dunne says. He kept one back for himself from the Gritti Palace in Venice. “I hid it,” he says, “because my daughter and I once spent Thanksgiving with him there.”

Some people are in it for more practical reasons. Stanley Tucci recently told T&C that when he’s on a global film tour, he’ll occasionally help himself to dopp-kit essentials. “Sometimes the toiletries,” he says. “Just because you know you’re gonna be traveling a lot, you might as well just have a little extra something.” Slippers, however, are where he draws the line entirely. “No,” he says. “I hate slippers.” Luca Virgilio, general manager of the Dorchester in London, is equally measured in his own confessions. His most coveted hotel souvenir? A shoehorn. “Not a precious looking one,” he says, “so I didn’t feel too guilty about it. But useful enough to take it away with me.”

Some sticky-fingered travelers have their eyes on prizes much larger than a shoehorn. At the Concorso d'Eleganza at Villa d’Este on Lake Como earlier this year, Weiss watched as guests—fortified, he suspects, by more than a little liquid courage—made off with the hotel’s Bernardaud espresso cups and saucers in considerable numbers. When the bar at the Edition Hotel first opened, staff were reportedly trained to monitor for missing glassware the moment a guest signed their check or ordered another round. And at the St. Regis Rome, Weiss witnessed what may be the most audacious attempt in recent memory: a guest trying to depart with the full set of in-room TechnoGym weights. “They didn’t conceal the bag they came in,” he recalls. “The bellman politely asked that they be left behind for their next visit.”

One theft that still baffles the Dorchester’s Virgilio: a group of guests, all from the same country, staying across multiple rooms, who checked out leaving behind an unexpected gap—the toilet roll holders, ripped clean from the walls. “All of a sudden, when they left, they all took away our toilet roll holders,” he says. A coordinated operation, apparently, carried out in silence, bracket by bracket. He might take comfort in knowing that some thieves confess to cosmic consequences for their actions. A hospitality executive, who asked not to be identified, admits to liberating a kimono-style robe from Aman Tokyo. “But it was too long and I kept tripping over it,” she says. “Maybe it was karma.”

Branded pens are one of the easiest and most acceptable to steal items from any hotel.

But where do the hotels draw the line between an acceptable loss and something more? “It always depends if the guest is a VIP, how long they stayed with us, and in what spirit they took the item away,” Virgilio says. “In the spirit of having a memento from their time with us, we have pretended in the past not to notice that a vase or an art piece has gone missing.” When discretion is no longer an option, the hotel has been known to write to the guest, noting that they noticed the item had departed, and that a charge would follow. Most guests, Virgilio says, have taken it in good humor. A few wrote back to say they hadn’t realized and offered to send the item home. “I guess there’s not one rule that fits all.”

Then there was the guest who, over the course of a stay, quietly assembled an entire tableware set—silverware, chinaware, crystal—one room service trolley at a time. “Every day, we noticed that items were missing,” Virgilio recalls. On the final evening, the hotel made its move: a suitcase was opened, the missing pieces found neatly arranged inside and silently retrieved. “We didn’t say anything,” he says, “and the guest never said a word. A secret we both kept.”

Valentina De Santis, the owner and CEO of Grand Hotel Tremezzo and Passalacqua on Lake Como, recalls a guest so smitten with the hotel’s famously heavenly bed linens that they stripped an entire bed and packed every last sheet, leaving behind nothing but a bare mattress. Another, captivated by the color and fabric of a room’s curtains, cut out a large square to use as a sample for recreating them at home. “We certainly take it as the ultimate testament to our design,” De Santis says, “though we’d much prefer guests ask where they can purchase these pieces rather than helping themselves.” Luckily, anyone enchanted with the hotel’s aesthetic now has a sanctioned outlet: most of its signature pieces are shoppable through Tremezzo’s online boutique, Sense of Lake.

The Ocean Club, a Four Seasons Resort in the Bahamas, took the principle further still—straight into product design. Guests had long been making off with the local rum from the minibar, so the resort simply gave up the pretense and built a parting gift around it: a small bottle of Bahamian rum, presented on a coaster with two crested shot glasses, accompanied by a card reading, “With our compliments. Savor a piece of paradise. We invite you to enjoy this local Bahamian rum during your stay—or to take home.” Guests take the bottle. Often, the resort notes, they take the glasses too. The beach bag tells a longer story. While most resorts charge guests who walk off with the tote, the Ocean Club hands one to every arriving guest—along with two logoed caps—no questions asked. The bag changes color annually, making it, by design, a collector's item.

Ken Fulk, the interior designer behind the Beverly Hills Hotel’s five new culinary and cocktail venues, designs for theft on purpose. “As someone who helps craft these legendary locales, I definitely strive to create something that’s coveted and worth stealing,” he says. “Frankly, we know we’ve succeeded when guests take something home in their luggage. Of course this can go too far, but...” His own favorite keepsake, fittingly, didn’t come from a job—it came from a guest. It hangs in his outdoor shower in Provincetown: a pool buoy from the Chateau Marmont, gifted to him during late night shenanigans by a pop star he declines to name. “Not sure how I managed to slip out with it,” he says, “but I wasn’t about to give it back after the swoon-worthy troubadour gave it to me.”

The great hotels have always known that the most coveted thing isn’t the robe or the ashtray or the espresso cup. It’s the moment. The perfect club sandwich by the pool. The sunset on the last night that stopped you cold. The dinner that stretched well past midnight and the impromptu karaoke in the bar afterwards. The beautiful objects are just how you sneak it home—and the best hotels, it turns out, have been packing your bag for you all along.

William Li