London’s swishest new hotels are calling
A trio of new London hotels tempt with polish, personality and strong design statements. Choose from maximalist whimsy, high-tech splendour and historical grandeur.
From the West End to East London, the English capital is blessed with top-tier hotels – ultra-luxe havens, charismatic boutique properties and quirky boltholes among them. In the last year alone, three dashing new arrivals have materialised, each with a distinct personality: Broadwick Soho, The Peninsula and Raffles at the OWO. We checked in to assess these new crown jewels in the hotel scene.
BROADWICK SOHO
“People don’t take trips,” wrote John Steinbeck, “trips take people.” So is the philosophy behind a new crop of transportive London hotels. Raffles at the Old War Office is a deep-dive into the grandeur of national military history. The Peninsula London celebrates the “best of British” through Chinese eyes. But Broadwick Soho, opened last November, leads down a more quirky rabbit hole in the capital’s psyche. It could be called a “magic” wormhole. For this small boutique hotel in a black glaze-dripped brick building, just across Broadwick Street from old-school boozer The Blue Posts and the once “un-gentrifiable” Berwick Street, is partly an homage to the Soho of yesteryear, London’s once gloriously down-at-heel nightlife square mile long before the global chains moved in. This is the Soho of Francis Bacon when, at lock-ins at the Colony Room, he mingled with West End demimonde, David Bowie and Princess Margaret and naughty nights continued behind the heavily ruched festoon blinds at somebody’s great-aunt’s townhouse.
Bacon could be the patron saint of Broadwick Soho. Two of his works hang in the low-lit lobby, aglow in nectarine gloss paint and Iksel parrot wallpaper, over a concierge desk made of Norwegian pink marble and ostrich leather, another flamboyant bird. Somehow the spectre of Bowie also manages to be present upstairs via a William Turnbull sculpture and a 16-strong collection of Warhol’s 1955 illustrations À la Recherche du Shoe Perdu, both bought from the late musician’s estate. Meanwhile, a side room off the lobby is a dead-cert entry for “coolest front desk”: a Bridget Riley painting hangs on embroidered jacquard walls, while dynamic male staff wear tailored leopard-print tuxedo jackets, a reissue of archive fabric from a Milanese wool mill. Elsewhere, female staff wear Ossie Clark-inspired polka-dot jumpsuits. Be it on textiles, wallpaper, curtains, furniture, marble or carpets – a ’70s red flame design laps the upstairs corridors like a disco inferno – the whole place is carousing in patterns by the dimmed light of Murano chandeliers.
At first, it’s easy to mistake the one-off Broadwick for another branded hotel. Its name could confuse it with Richard Caring’s Soho House group. Its kind of exhibitionism is also favoured by Big Mamma of London’s showgirl trattorias. The English eccentricity was masterminded by Martin Brudnizki, the maximalist interior designer who did Caring’s Annabel’s and The Ivy chain. And it was financed by tech gaming entrepreneur Noel Hayden, founder of Gamesys, who has money to throw at things. Here no corners were cut: everything is hand-plucked and handcrafted. The disco inferno carpet even continues for seven floors of back stairs along with Murano wall sconces and solid English oak banisters. But what sets the Broadwick apart is not just an independent spirit, but the lack of brand “bull” behind it. For its backstory is an improbably poignant tale.
Broadwick Soho is an authentic love letter to Hayden’s parents, now in their 90s, who in 1973 bought a hotel they named Mon Ami in Bournemouth, a seaside town on the South Coast, where their son grew up making toast for two hundred and discovering Space Invaders in the arcade. Noel Senior was a magician who put on shows twice a week: a Wes Anderson-esque 1970s photograph of a tuxedoed 10-year-old Noel on the Mon Ami stage with his father and his mother, Jackie, dressed in fishnets as magician’s assistant, hangs in the Flute bar on the seventh floor. But tragedy struck in 1983 – after an expensive hotel refurbishment, a failed attempt to lure back customers from Spain, the family went bankrupt and lost not only Mon Ami but everything. Returning to London, they lived in a series of rented one-bedroom flats and the young Noel, now 13, never went back to school, instead hanging out in the arcades of Soho where he would found his future businesses and incubate a dream to, one day, give back his parents their lost one; or at least a contemporary tribute to it full of Proustian ’70s and ’80s references.
In 2017, Hayden bought a 1970s office block to demolish. The fact that the new building that replaced it has the immediate feel of an old-school Soho institution, aided by the rabbit-warren irregularities, is a credit to the camaraderie of the friends Hayden brought on board for the project: best mate Jo Ringestad, whose mother owns a hotel on the French-Monaco border; restaurateur Jamie Poulton, co-owner of Soho’s independent seafood establishment Randall & Aubin; Andrea Gelardin, who has art directed for Lady Gaga; as well as Bundaberg-born Aussie Joshua Gardner as executive director. “Making the hotel was deeply personal to all of us,” Gardner says in all-day café Bar Jackie over coffee in cups by Norwegian porcelain brand Figgjo on a table by Turkish furniture designer Yılmaz Doğan with a pattern reminiscent of Space Invaders. “It wasn’t just a story of Noel’s family but our friendship.” With a prestigious career forged at the Four Seasons and Richard Caring’s empire as well as a period as a five-star-hotel inspector, his experience and attention to detail were fundamental. “But in this hotel, we made our own rules,” he adds. For example, staff were hired on personality not experience and drilled by Gardner for months.
The 57 rooms, including nine suites and penthouse, all avoid his bugbears: there are no unnecessary lights or frustrating riddles to turning them off; towelling dressing gowns have adjustable waists for different heights. Bedside lamps throw flattering diffused light; mattresses have feather toppers washed in Bavarian spring water; rooms are soundproofed; curtains are black-out; milk-thistle hangover pills are provided. Rooms come in blue hues or pinks and greens lined with velvet custom-made beds and standing elephant cocktail cabinets made in Jaipur. At times one might be in a whimsical 1920s London townhouse – the new oak parquet flooring was aged several generations in giant tumble dryers. At others in Bombay or New York. Festoon blinds everywhere keep the more prosaic contemporary reality of Soho out.
The dark-red embossed brocade walls and demi-monde lighting at basement restaurant Dear Jackie oozes New York’s Little Italy in the ’70s and ’80s. A saucy British twist is added with hanging plates by ceramicist Michaela Gall on the themes of Soho, royalty and sex, and the red-striped white Murano wall sconces that recall barbers’ poles or seaside “sticks of rock”. Meanwhile, plates by chef Harry Faddy, formerly of Aquavit and the River Café, turn out to be delightfully un-faddy, with simple updates on classics such as pappardelle with braised rabbit and roast monkfish. But it’s the state-of-the-art sound system that perfects the night, emitting disco tunes that envelop diners like sequin capes without drowning out their companions.
After a digestivo, there is rooftop Flute for a Negroni at the oval onyx bar beneath a mirrored ceiling with Murano lanterns like multiple moons. The clam-shell lights on the curtained DJ booth are exact replicas of the stage lights at Mon Ami. After a while the leopard-print chairs begin to be a tribute to all the Jackies: Kennedy, Collins, Stallone as well as Hayden. Meanwhile, in the ground-floor Nook lounge bar, mirrored cabaret tables are more nods to the erstwhile hotel. Equipped with decks and vinyl, open all night and exclusively for hotel guests, this space is the ace up Broadwick Soho’s sleeve that is luring the transatlantic crowd from the sedate glamour of Claridge’s in Mayfair back to the naughty, eclectic fun of Soho. broadwicksoho.com
THE PENINSULA
As the tabloid story goes: Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels spent 30 years looking for a prestigious enough address to open a Peninsula in London. Then in 2016 it bagged 1 Grosvenor Place on Hyde Park Corner boasting both Buckingham Palace and Harrods as neighbours. They subsequently spent a billion pounds building a sleek 190-key futuristic feng shui temple, nine floors up and five floors down, to the Asian idea of old-school Britishness served by a fleet of hybrid Bentleys and a 1935 Rolls-Royce Phantom. (The hotel hold music is 1967’s “You Only Live Twice”.) The smallest rooms are bigger than your average two-bedroom flat and equipped with scanner-printers, a Dyson nail-dryer and a robotic toilet. And, yes, there’s a two-floor spa with cult Margy’s products, 25 residences and two ballrooms and the luxury retail arcade houses only the second Asprey store in London.
But the best things about the Peninsula aren’t the headlines. There’s New York interior designer Peter Marino’s tribute to nearby Apsley House (home to the Dukes of Wellington) in the triple-height lobby with Neoclassical columns, Czech chandeliers and a “papier peint panoramique” of the 19th-century Royal Parks in block-printed de Gournay wallpaper. And the local collaborations with British talents Jenny Packham (on uniforms), Timothy Han (on scents) and heritage florist Moyses Stevens (the Peninsula flower shop) and two-starred Bibendum’s Claude Bosi, at Brooklands restaurant. The lifts have “elevator dials”, while rooms have a valet box, which means your outfit will be magically pressed and returned to your room without interruption.
The lighting is sensational: everyone, everywhere looks airbrushed. The service is dazzling. Members of staff including the beaming bellhops in brass-buttoned uniforms know your name. Some might find the lift that mimics a hot-air balloon and architect David Archer’s homage to Concorde in Brooklands a little theme park-y. But the Wong Kar-wai glamour of Canton Blue restaurant in crushed blues and reds with installations of ceramics hand-painted in Hong Kong may make it the sexiest eatery in town. peninsula.com
RAFFLES AT THE OWO
The epicentre of British government, Whitehall has been called many things. Glamorous isn’t one of them. But all that changed last northern autumn when Raffles – the brand behind Singapore’s British colonial-era hotel icon – opened at the OWO (the building formerly known as the Old War Office), which spent six years undergoing an audacious, mass-scale restoration over 14 floors, seven of them underground. The grand Edwardian Baroque structure built in 1906 to house around 2500 government and military personnel is the official British monument where Winston Churchill puffed and paced some of the four kilometres of corridors both as Secretary of State for War from 1919 to 1921 and head of the War Coalition from 1940. Some three metres wide, they are now carpeted in imposing military reds.
The British Hinduja Group spent £1.5 billion on the lease and renovation for their revivalist vision of suitable gravitas. Interiors were designed by late French architect Thierry Despont, who also restored the Statute of Liberty; the Secretary of State for War’s office is now the Haldane Suite (one of 39 suites among 120 rooms), all fireplaces, plum damask wallpaper and oak panelling. The cool, clean new Edwardian style accented by contemporary lighting steers successfully towards elegance and away from museum territory. And the hotel’s managing director is Philippe Leboeuf whose distinguished CV includes London Claridge’s, New York’s The Carlyle and Paris’s Hotel Crillon no less.
It feels reductive to call the complex a new lifestyle destination; although it is, with an aptly impressive line-up. A wellness centre extends over four floors (three underground) with London’s first Guerlain spa and fitness program run by Pillar Wellbeing. There are nine restaurants, three overseen by executive chef Mauro Colagreco of thrice-starred, former world number one Mirazur. But the OWO featuring Raffles also succeeds as a living, breathing tribute to the might and grandeur of Britain’s past without a touch of jingoism. The whole place is fascinating and moving for the achievements, not of the empire, but the every-man: the wartime message boys who cycled the corridors; the mounted on Horse Guards Avenue, who get their own tribute bar (one of three). And the fallen who have not been forgotten: a poignant two-floor Lasvit glass installation called Poppies hangs in an event space above the courtyard. raffles.com