Design, character and the buildings that give a stay its shape.
Shoreditch
Warehouse buildings, creative studios and East London energy
Soho
Restaurants, music and central London after dark
Covent Garden
Theatre streets, late dinners and West End pace
These are the cool hotels in London we would book first, each chosen for their design, atmosphere and the way they shape the stay around them.
A Lutyens bank on Poultry that sat empty for five years before someone walked in and couldn’t leave.
The Midland Bank left in 2007 and the building sat empty until Ron Burkle walked in five years later and saw something worth saving. What he found was 92 verdite marble columns, walnut-panelled counters, a basement vault with a two-metre-wide door and safety deposit boxes that once held gold bullion worth £335 million. The original offices became 250 bedrooms, the secretaries’ offices became bathrooms. On the ground floor, 850 people can eat where the bank clerks once stood, across ten restaurants that keep the space moving from breakfast through late evening. The City of London empties at the weekend. The Ned does not.
Redchurch Townhouse is Soho House without the membership, sitting above Cecconi’s on Shoreditch’s best street.
Cecconi’s on the ground floor runs from breakfast through dinner, the kind of room that fills with locals as much as guests. The building sits quietly on Redchurch Street, 37 rooms above a restaurant that already belongs to the neighbourhood. Upstairs, velvet sofas, mid-century pieces and Cowshed products give the rooms enough warmth to come back to. The design never overreaches. Shoreditch House is two minutes away if you need a pool. The street outside handles everything else.
Named after the cabinetmakers who worked this site in the 1800s, and designed to make sure you know it.
Hart takes its name from the Hart family, cabinetmakers who occupied this site in the 1800s, and Fabled Studio ran with that history rather than decorating over it. The bespoke lighting is shaped like cabinetmaker’s boxes. The staircase is wrought iron and copper. Sage velvets, woven linens and Kilim patterns replace the exposed brick and filament bulb Shoreditch that most hotels around here still lean on. Barboun downstairs serves Eastern Mediterranean sharing plates in a room worth staying for. On Great Eastern Street, closer to Old Street than Brick Lane, the hotel sits on the more composed edge of Shoreditch.
Design-conscious stays, later dinners and travellers who want Shoreditch with some craft behind it.
A former magistrates court on Bow Street, where the jail cells became guest rooms and the courtroom became a ballroom.
The building was Bow Street Magistrates Court before NoMad arrived, and that history is still present in the bones of it. The original courtroom is now the Magistrates Ballroom. Some of the guest rooms were jail cells. Outside, the Royal Opera House sits directly opposite. Roman and Williams worked the tension between the building’s institutional weight and something warmer, hand-embroidered damasks, veined marble, custom limed-plaster walls and velvets that give the 91 rooms a richness the exterior never promises. The atrium restaurant holds the social energy through the day. Side Hustle goes later underground.
Five Georgian townhouses on Berners Street, where the Edwardian bones are still doing most of the work.
The building was the Berners Hotel long before it became the EDITION, the kind of place Virginia Woolf and Thomas Hardy used. Oak floors, wood-panelled walls and rooms designed to feel like the interior of a private yacht sit quietly against six-metre ceilings and original stucco above. Berners Tavern anchors the ground floor with chandeliers modelled on Grand Central Station and Jason Atherton’s seasonal British cooking. The Punch Room sits behind it, one of the better bars in this part of London. Soho is a short walk south. The building stays quieter.
Shoreditch
Creative studios, warehouse buildings and East London energy
Soho
Restaurants, music and central London after dark
Romantic Hotels in London
Softer light and more considered spaces
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