I agree totally about the hallways - the cheap trim, color scheme, and lighting makes me feel like I'm in a hospital or upscale nursing home - not a "luxury" hotel - totally unsuccessful design.

Elevator renovation even changing panels in the cab is very expensive so they are rarely more than superficially touched in renovations - I consider what was done to them at the PH to be fairly major actually. I'm not sure why elevator changes are so expensive but when I was a general manager of a large office building - someone had scratched the inside door panels of one of the cabs and it was like $10k to replace. So actually telling the "real" age of a building is pretty easy when you see the elevator.