Welcome to the magical luxury tour

One of the great achievements of our patchy age is the democratisation of privileged experiences. Good coffee, for instance, used to be an exclusive rarity. Now it's everywhere. Five pence will buy you a razor of perfection beyond the imagination of the ostrich-feathered Sun King. These are benefits, but the abuse of the word is not. "Luxury", like the word "designer" and before that "executive", is becoming so attenuated, abused and corrupted as to be nearly meaningless. Today, when supermarkets will sell you a "luxury" breakfast food, or "luxury" toilet tissue, the word is robbed of whatever small remaining meaning attached to it.

People use the word as part of a fundamental need to discriminate. People love hierarchies: rather as crusty old Oxford don Geoffrey Madan said of snobbery, it is merely having a graduated conception of one's fellows. The same with "luxury", it is our discriminator of the moment. But "luxury" can be too easily confused with vulgar excess and brainless indulgence.

This version of luxury was the one that, in Gibbon's view, led to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire: "a vain emulation of luxury, not merit" had corrupted the emperors. Today we also mistake form and content. There are hotels that still believe in lazy decorative complexity rather than in space or service. True determinants of luxury today are the quality of experience, not the gaudy add-ons. I would like to tear the throats out of those idiots who think I want a toffee on my hotel pillow. Gold taps and an onyx bath are less appealing than particle filtered air, purified water, linen sheets. Silence is preferable to a plasma screen and an iPod dock. Renault caught the mood perfectly with its recent advertisements for the Espace MPV, asking, as readers gazed at a Sugimoto seascape of empty, gorgeous infinity, "Isn't space the greatest luxury?"

First-class air travel is the same. Only a fool would pay the premium to get a spoonful of British Airways caviar and a glass of first growth claret (you can carry them on yourself as hand baggage). These replicate a Reigate "executive's" concept of luxury circa 1977. What a First Class passenger pays for is an absence of negatives, not a preponderance of vulgar positives. First Class edits the maddening crowd.

Take cars. Almost everything not Korean is executive and almost everything not executive is luxury. The middle-market has imploded: like Starbucks, BMW is now the norm. Fine cars, but they leave a sensible definition of luxury still wanting. True luxury is a state of mind, not an inventory of chattels, or a high specification including ruched leather, DAB and sat-nav. True sophisticates want less, not more.

People used to speak of "idle luxury". If only. Any fool today can acquire a life dense with objects, noise, clutter and confusion. We are not going to die of ignorance, but of complexity. Travel, once the province of a privileged few, has become a gross commodity. Instead, the luxurious quest is to restrict and reduce, to define excellence and to retreat into it. Possibly even stay at home. Stavros Niarchos had some splendid advice about how best to avoid the gravity of possessions. Thinking of yachts, planes and fancy women he said: "If it floats, flies or fornicates [the Greek shipowner actually used a simpler f-word]... rent it." His contemporary Gianni Agnelli once also mused on the problems of owning stuff. Everything in life, he said, is on loan. That's what happens to us when we travel, especially with luxury travel: we hire status, short-term. It's vicarious.

So, what are the determinants today? I spent lunch on New Year's Eve at the Hotel de Paris, Monte Carlo, one on the residences of Alain Ducasse, the chef with his own planetary system of Michelin stars. A universal problem with "luxury" hotels now is that the residents schlump around in shorts and T-shirts, and there is little stimulus or need for the passing trade to acknowledge any more rarefied dress-code. So, the bar looked like Gatwick's North Terminal at four o'clock in the morning on a Bank Holiday. It is mad to see a frock-coated waiter serving a mutt in a Detroit Diesel trucker's cap. Still, that did not prevent them charging £150 for a round of six drinks. After, we left and crossed the Place du Casino, a Babylon of slowly parking expensive German metal, Russian hookers, and files of glum Prada and cashmere. Into the Metropole mall, a marble and chandelier Babylon of branded excess that would have made one of Gibbon's most decadent emperors blush. One of my companions, a Swiss historian who recently sold his business for several million, grimaced and said, "Wouldn't we all prefer to be in a little cabanon in the arriere-pays?" Yes, we most certainly would.

And what of restaurants? Nowhere is the conception of "luxury" more old-fashioned. The rising cloches, stiff naperie, spun sugar and ancien régime service! The frigid, gilded cage of Gordon Ramsay's regime! The molecular experiments of Blumenthal! Fascinating and impressive, maybe. But luxurious? No. As experiences they are technical exercises, not luxurious ones. They are uncomfortable. In contrast, the food at The Wolseley in London is only ordinary-good, but the doorman remembers your name. And what a business he runs! Every time he does this, I tip him £10, it makes me feel so good. And no one has ever said that of Gordon Ramsay.

Or take Racine on London's Brompton Road. Here the cuisine bourgeois has many admirers, but wins few awards in an award business impressed by neophilia, not sustained quality. Still, at Racine, they neglect to employ leering, patronising sommeliers, instead they bring a favourite aperitif to your table before you even ask. At the Grande Bretagne in Athens, €5 buys you a glass of Assyrtiko, iced water, good nuts, an hour in fierce air-conditioning in a vast, silent winter garden and access to superb loos. After a hot and dusty journey, that's luxury. Any good restaurant or bar, irrespective of its food or decoration, makes you feel good. It's back to states of mind, not decoration.

Frank Lloyd Wright said he cared not a damn about the essentials of life, given an adequate supply of the luxuries. But these luxuries were not defined by opulence, ostentation, rich flavours and strong sensations. They can be simple things, as another architect noted. Le Corbusier in 1925 thought how superior was Lenin on his cane chair, drinking a 20 centime coffee from a white porcelain cup, writing on sheets of industrially produced typing paper. By this reasoning, a warm cell in an isolated Landmark Trust property is a more compellingly luxurious experience than Park Lane's Dorchester Hotel, with its hangover of faded opulence, its stale pretensions. Any dissenters ?

And what of classic luxury resorts St Moritz or St Tropez? There are still pleasures to be found in each - in Switzerland, a private deck at Badrutt's Palace or a view of the Majola windings - but the reality is St Moritz's best hotels are full of cake-eating Gazprom or Sibneft womenfolk, wrapped in summer furs, waiting for Zegna-clad partners in security-glassed Lexus 4x4s, chasing an idea of luxury that was redundant when Nietzsche left town. In the Var, a port-side seat at Senequier offers world-class people-watching. But, truly, if you want to know what God thinks of St Tropez, just look who he sends there. As Noël Coward asked, why do the wrong people travel, when the right ones stay at home - in real luxury.

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