First look: Chelsea’s Beaverbrook Townhouse hotel blends vintage and luxury
With aristocratic connections, eclectic interiors and a Japanese restaurant, this boutique bolthole stands out from the crowd.
If London really is a series of villages, none can match Chelsea for its standalone style; a gleaming bubble of elegance that retains its effortless sheen, no matter how much other neighbourhoods wax and wane. It’s a place of chic boutiques, artisan bakeries and boutiques selling Persian carpets and handmade ceramics, wrapped around leafy private squares that always bring to mind memories of Hugh Grant scrambling over a wall in the movie Notting Hill.
Chelsea may be glamorous, but it’s of the old-school, understated kind, which makes Beaverbrook Townhouse a perfect fit. You could walk straight past it, save for the neat blue awning above the small roadside terrace; stepping inside feels almost like being invited into a private home, albeit one with a beguilingly eclectic sense of style. The chequerboard lobby floor is a mere hint of what’s to come. There’s a cocoon-like reception area, ablaze with statement wallpaper, retro prints and cherry- red shelves crammed with books, while opposite, Sir Frank’s Bar oozes vintage style with claret-hued stools around the tiled, sailor-blue bar.
The retro-glam feel is a deliberate tip of the hat to the hotel’s namesake; Lord Beaverbrook, Britain’s premier media baron and powerbroker in the first half of the 20th century. Famous for the parties and dinners that took place at his mansion, Cherkley Court, in the Surrey Hills, his former home reopened as The Beaverbrook hotel in 2017 after a five-year, £90m refit. Six years later, in September 2023, the Beaverbrook Townhouse opened, offering guests the chance to pair a stay in the bucolic Surrey countryside with a night or two at what has quickly become of the most exclusive addresses in the capital.
Beaverbrook Townhouse’s exclusivity is due in no small part to the small inventory of just 14 guestrooms, each named after a London theatre, with playbills and photographs from musicals, operas and plays dotted across the walls. Ours is the Coliseum, home of the English National Opera, but despite the nod to the capital’s theatrics, the room has a traditional, country house feel with a polished armoire, powder-pink velvet armchair for two and a sumptuously comfortable four-poster bed, all set against a backdrop of muted green walls.
It’s the kind of room that grows more luxurious the more time you spend there, with small touches that add up to something faultless. There are complimentary soft drinks in the minibar – Fentiman’s pink lemonade and Fever-Tree tonics – pre-mixed cocktails on the welcome tray, a full-sized bath and airconditioning that murmurs rather than whirrs. By the time we’re ready to go down for dinner, it feels quite hard to leave the room at all. But the effort soon proves worth it. Drinks – a crisp gin and tonic, spiked with orange zest and a glass of excellent English champagne – lead into a conversation with the man sitting beside us, a tequila-drinking Hollywood film distributor, who tells us he’s about to open a chain of taco restaurants. It feels like Sir Frank’s Bar is the kind of clubby place where chatting to complete strangers is the most natural thing in the world.
From Sir Frank’s, we’re taken through to the Fuji Grill restaurant (both facsimiles of the bar and restaurant at the Beaverbrook in Surrey). As we settle into our corner table, it strikes me we could be in New York. The room’s salmon-pink booths, polished wood, low lighting and Japanese prints on the bottle-green walls convey an Upper East Side meets Tokyo vibe. I watch as dusky pink plates topped with blackened cod, crispy tempura crab and berry-hued sashimi whisk past, but it still doesn’t quite prepare me for just how fabulous the food is going to be.
Everything we eat, every mouthful, is just lip-smacking good, including satin-soft slivers of tuna tartare warmed with flakes of truffle; fluffy popcorn shrimp with a zingy dip; and sushi that’s almost too pretty to eat. A whole sea bass fillet – light as air and rich with umami and citrus flavours – almost finishes us, but somehow we find room for the Dessert Bento, a feathery blueberry souffle, milk chocolate mousse and a succulent, honey yuzu cheesecake.
I’d thought that dinner would be the highlight of our stay, but it turns out that one of the Townhouse’s biggest treats isn’t actually in the hotel at all. Opposite Beaverbrook’s Georgian frontage, the manicured green lawns and floral borders of Cadogan Gardens lie hidden behind locked gates, to which the hotel receptionist holds a key. We let ourselves in to find the leafy square entirely empty apart from us; the statuesque oak trees, full-sized tennis court and elegant statues hidden from the world in plain sight.
Our turn around the gardens isn’t really enough to deserve a hearty breakfast, but despite my attempt to just order granola and yoghurt, somehow a silky Eggs Benedict arrives at the table. “You have to treat yourself,” says our waitress, beaming. “You’re on holiday after all”. And even though we’ve only been away 12 hours, and the whirl of London’s streets lies just outside the door, that’s exactly how it feels, as if we have stepped back into a gentler, more glamorous past, all right in the heart of the city.
In the know
Beaverbrook Townhouse, 115-166 Sloane Street, has rooms with breakfast from £580 ($1216) a night for two guests. Seasonal rates and weekend variations apply.
Annabelle Thorpe was a guest of Beaverbrook Townhouse.
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