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“ Design matters – for individuals, for cities, for the future. Do not take design for granted, it will outlast us. So scrutinize it.” – from the website for the

Living Shangri-La luxury hotel and residences in Toronto

The ability to fill a bathtub with hot, steaming water in two minutes – that's just one of the luxuries that Toronto's new Four Seasons Hotel, currently under construction, is being designed to provide. Guest rooms measuring some 500 square feet are the promise of the Shangri-La Hotel, also under construction in the city. Exposing visitors to exotic woods and masses of marble is how the Trump Tower and the Ritz-Carlton plan to lure their guests inside.

But besides offering plush layers of luxury, these hotels have something else in common: They'll all be energy hogs.

I wish I could put a soft, white Frette towel over my head and ignore this depressing piece of news. We all like our luxury whenever and wherever we can get it. But, wow, this is a missed opportunity – four missed opportunities, in fact – to brand a truly 21st-century hotel as a refuge of exquisite delights that doesn't wreck the planet.

Buildings consume enormous amounts of energy, even more than cars, accounting for about half the world's carbon emissions. That includes the manufacture of their composite parts (think of the heat required to produce concrete and steel) as well as the energy needed to build and operate tall towers.

It's remarkable to think that hotels, like most any tall tower in North America, still rely on 50-year-old building technology.

Imagine a different scenario: on the rooftop of the Four Seasons, 55 storeys up, a series of solar panels that could harness enough energy to heat almost all of the water for those showers and baths of steaming water.

Would that hurt the Four Seasons brand? I think not. In fact, 20 years from now, when climate-change begins to kick in, a hotel's ability to spin on renewable resources might be just what it requires to maintain international credibility and, indeed, its own survival.

In the case of the glitzy four, there are some progressive moves worth noting. The glass curtains of most luxury hotels are finely tuned systems designed to deflect the strong rays of the sun, and they drop seamlessly past the concrete building slabs on each floor to prevent unneeded heat loss. The hotels going up in Toronto will boast recovery systems that extract heat from exhaust air and channel it into incoming air. Sophisticated mechanical systems will mean that fresh air circulates evenly throughout the building.

But in Europe, such initiatives are considered grade-school. In a country such as Germany, for instance, it costs six times as much to heat a building as it does in Canada – and that's made for a radicalization of the building industry. Four luxury towers going up in Toronto and, though they'll cut graceful glass figures in the sky, they're actually dinosaurs.

At a total project cost of $500-million, the Four Seasons Hotel and Residences is loading an extra 253 hotel rooms and 202 Four Seasons-branded residential units into Yorkville. Scheduled for completion in 2011, it is now a massive hole in the ground, excavated for foundation piles and underground parking. It would have been a relative cinch to install geothermal pipes within the excavation, and effectively use the Earth's energy to heat and cool the building, employing a sustainable intelligence that has been tapped through the ages.

In Sweden, approximately 75 per cent of all new buildings are heated by geothermal energy. In Canada, fewer than 1 per cent are.

Why? Because the building industry is remarkably conservative. Because, in the case of luxury hotels, their chains make enormous profits without making the effort to build towers that could reduce carbon emissions by 50 per cent. Because governments don't mandate change through building codes. Because the wealthy people who can afford five-star hotels don't have a chic alternative.

As Toronto Four Seasons Hotel architect Peter Clewes explains, “Geothermal is, conceptually, an amazing system, but it's an unproven system in Toronto. If you find out that it's not adequate, you're caught with your pants down. I think people in the building industry are very gun-shy. They're risk-averse. It's an unbelievably conservative industry. Any time we try to do something different, it's rejected.”

Refusal to change for the sake of the planet astounds Ted Kesik, an acclaimed building scientist and associate professor at the University of Toronto. “Luxury hotel chains cater to people who are well-to-do and presumably well-educated, and they must know that there are consequences to their behaviour.

“So why would they want to support something that is unsustainable? If you're not going to set an example as somebody who can afford an extra $30 for your room, who the hell is?”

Kesik is the chief author of the Toronto Green Development Cost-Benefit Study and of the just-released Tower Renewal Guidelines, a unique piece of research in North America that provides detailed construction drawings for building owners to retrofit their postwar towers (mostly apartments) into more sustainable buildings.

Here's Kesik on several ways to bring luxury hotels into the 21st century:

On intelligent rooms: “Energy-management systems should be installed in every hotel room, so that the system – air conditioning, heating, television and lights – all shut down the moment you leave the room.”

On rooftops: “A hotel has rooftop areas and some area on the side of the building envelope. If it doesn't have enough, it can purchase rooftop area from neighbours. People lease roofs to put up billboards; why not lease a roof on which to put your solar panels? If you're a good corporate citizen, that's what you do.”

On geothermal energy: “When you're doing deep foundations with underground parking, that's the ideal time to put in geothermal. I don't know why they [the Four Seasons, Ritz-Carlton, Trump Tower and Shangri-La] didn't. Bore holes are done at the bottom of the excavation. They're usually put all around the foundation piles and then go down about 300 to 500 feet [90 to 150 metres]. They missed their chance.”

On energy labels: “People know more about the performance of a $1,000 laptop than they do about a $400,000 condominium unit. The government keeps saying it's going to put energy labels on buildings, but I haven't seen them. We've had them on fridges and stoves and cars for years.”

Change within the conservative hotel industry may move at a turtle's pace, but change will eventually come.

Yabu Pushelberg are the renowned Toronto designers charged with creating the Four Seasons main lobbies, restaurants and bars as emotional rather than iconic spaces. Their entrance lobby is conceived as a series of intimate chambers you walk through, with a couple of mezzanines floating overhead. Rather than featuring outlandish, nearly extinct exotic woods, YP has worked with local designers Moss + Lamb to create art-installation walls. A series of veils made of custom, black-polished chrome have been produced by a local fabricator. (“I think a hotel needs personality,” says Glenn Pushelberg, “it's own visual voice.”)

The new 62-storey Shangri-La in Vancouver was designed with geothermal heating and cooling. That's a truly five-star kind of achievement. And there is a hotel in Toronto that is about to test-drive the way of the future. Tom Rand, the clean-tech adviser at MaRS (the non-profit innovation institute in Toronto's downtown hospital district) is the owner of the Planet Traveller eco-hotel soon to open just west of the MaRS complex, on College Street.

Rand had grown cynical about the “greenwashing” of the hotel industry (properties trumpeting themselves as eco-friendly because they provide daily new towels and sheets only on request). He determined, instead, to create a low-carbon hostel for young travellers. His century-old building covered its site entirely, but tapping into geothermal energy was the goal.

And so he approached the City of Toronto Energy Efficiency Office for permission to drill eight geothermal tubes 115 metres into the ground in a lane adjoining his hostel. Along with permission to open up the lane, he also got the city's co-operation to manoeuvre the tubes between water, gas and sewage pipes. The total cost of the geothermal system was $240,000. That's about $100,000 more than a conventional boiler, but it will pay for itself within several years.

“Buildings are the one sector where you can make a profit by cutting carbons,” says Rand. “Buildings are the lowest-hanging fruit. You don't have to do it out of the goodness of your heart. With a hotel, you can do it simply because you want to save money.”

Could it be that the luxury of making money will be what saves the planet, not the luxury of knowing the right thing to do?