Over the past 5-10 years, Hilton has been aggressive in building new, upscale hotel properties on urban frontiers. See the Hilton connected to an event center in Omaha, or the new one near the museum in Denver, for instance. These hotels are ambitious, flashy, weirdly oversized for their locations, and a bit incongruous, perhaps overcompensating for their humble surroundings by overdoing the luxury decor a bit. The Hilton Americas in Houston is the most extreme example of this weirdness I've yet encountered.

The hotel is isolated from downtown Houston by a sea of parking lots at least 4 blocks wide. It's connected to the convention center and next to the Rockets arena, all part of a "renewed" area of the city with a new park and small pond, but it gives one the sense of being in a hotel on the moon. There is no street parking within a million miles that isn't aggressively metered, and the parking garage is a massive, expensive nightmare. Getting from the parking garage into the hotel feels like an endless hike; you have to traverse the entire hotel through a surreal, gigantic mezzanine, filled with giant planters and overwrought Chihuly chandeliers.

Check-in is annoying: the reservation, made for me by a business associate, had my first and last names reversed, and that made the clerks' brains explode, for some reason, and it took forever to work out. I asked where the health club was and was told it was $10 (!!!!) to use it. I told them I thought that was also annoying and they said if I joined their "Honors" club it would be free, so I did, and then it wasn't.

The hotel room numbers have 5 digits, like suburban addresses, since they apparently have over 100 rooms on each floor. Directional signs are nonsensical, listing all rooms in both directions somehow, although the floors are not circular, so if a maid tells you to go the wrong way, you'll walk a mile until you hit a dead end.

Oddly enough, the rooms are kind of cramped.

The health club, once I protested the fee and was let in "just this once" for free, was adequate, and only one other person was using it. Good job, Hilton, charging for that, you're obviously making a ton of money. The pool is free, and quite pleasant, up under the roof with a large, vertigo-inducing balcony next to it, to look out over the Houston wastelands.

Everywhere you turn, you have to pay more money. The coffee bar "proudly serves Starbucks coffee," but is pointedly NOT a Starbucks, so that an espresso can be $3.25. Of course, try to find a coffee or a restaurant somewhere else and be prepared to walk for an hour with no luck: you're on the moon, after all.

After a while, I realized the hotel was reminding me of nothing so much as the Hotel Rossiya, the gigantic hotel across Red Square from the Kremlin in Moscow that was recently torn down. The Rossiya was also head-spinningly massive, one block square, but maze-like and off-putting. Completely nonsensical "luxury" decor was tacked on to every surface in a futile attempt to compensate for the cavernous spaces, but rather than feeling impressive, it only served to give lodgers a sense of alienation. While the Hilton Americas is brand new and its luxury touches and terrible Chihuly glass blobs are still shiny, it seems like only a few years and an economic downturn will turn this into a dusty, massive monstrosity, an artifact of strange, heady times, when conventions of old ladies sharing quilting tips thought nothing of $30 lunch buffets. We'll look back and laugh, I hope.