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Duck Luxury at The Peabody

December 4, 2008

The Peabody Ducks — five mallards that parade through the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee — already had it pretty sweet. Their job is to swim in the hotel’s lobby fountain and provide camcorder and camera fodder for goggle-eyed visitors. And they never end up on the Peabody’s dinner menu.

But the mallard mascots’ lives just got even better, thanks to a new, $200,000 “Duck Palace” that the Peabody has built on its roof for their off-hours.

“The ducks bring a lot of business to our hotel,” said Kelly Earnest, the Peabody’s director of public relations. “We were gonna spend money to build a new one anyway, so we asked ourselves, ‘Why not make it fantastic?’”

With granite floors, ceiling fans, a fountain, and a “hutch” that’s a miniature of the hotel, the palace is an impressive upgrade from the ducks’ previous home, which was essentially a large cage carpeted with astroturf. It had been the ducks’ home for 23 years, and Kelly said that it had taught the Peabody practical lessons in duck palace design. “Granite is expensive,” she said, “but it can be hosed down easily. The ducks do make a mess.”

The Peabody’s franchise hotels in Little Rock, Arkansas, and Orlando, Florida, also have ducks. The Orlando hotel has a duck palace as well, shaped like a pagoda, which cost $100,000 when it was built 20 years ago. “It’s very nice,” Kelly said, “but I think that we’ve set the new standard for duck palaces.”

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