London’s most expensive suite – and a huge refurbishment – brings the exuberant Claridge’s hotel defiantly into the present. Not that it needs it. Could there be anywhere better to stay? Asks Adam Bloodworth
Take the stairs to the very top of Claridge’s, as high as you can go. Follow your nose literally right to the end of the last staircase, and eventually you’ll be confronted with a shimmering wall of dead insects. Tarantulas, beetles the size of your fist, magnificent butterflies. Enshrined in a massive frame, the deceased animals are designed into shapely configurations. This is a priceless piece of Damian Hirst art but it was deemed a bit too, well, full of dead bugs, to be inside the Penthouse Suite on the other side of the wall.
If you’re paying £60,000 per night you might not like the idea of waking up face to face with a plate-sized spider, and fair enough. That these beasts are outside offers the rest of us a glimpse at life on the better side of the wall, inside the most expensive hotel suite in London. PR teams often throw around superlatives about London hotels, this one is the ‘biggest’, and ‘this one is the best,’ but the Claridge’s Penthouse doesn’t need foreshadowing.
Taking over the entire top floor of the property at 1,500 square metres, there is a private pool, a sofa on a rail (so you can decide which panoramic London view to gawp at) and stone statues of female busts that have to be craned off and taken to street level if there are guests visiting who may find them offensive. (Do people actually stay here? Yep, not long before I visited a family had taken over for a number of weeks. Do they offer multi-night discounts? They won’t say, though my tour guide hints a shaving may have been clipped off the sum total of 60k per night times fourteen.)
If you like Damian Hirst but not bugs, we’ve got good news! There are 75 other original Hirsts within, and everything else is also custom made, including £30,000 pains of lookout glass and green onyx stone cut into spherical shapes by the designer Rémi Tessier. Cleaners talk about the “end user” – the guests – because there are so many daily cleaning protocols that people actually cohabiting in this place can seem an impossibly distant thought. The Penthouse has the feel of a prestigous art gallery, but it’s also more personal than that. Standing in it and looking out of that 30K glass, you need to hang around for a moment to just try to take in the majesty of the space.
Eight floors downstairs in The Fumoir cocktail bar, my drink was in a coupette glass from the 1920s. Top tip: sit up at the bar, ask nicely, and the staff will serve your poison in one of the century-old Lalique pieces that live in the cupboard by the bar, along with a beautiful old vase that’s so fragile it can’t be moved. A glass panel above the door was presented to the hotel by Renee Lalique himself in 1931, and the playful font and handsome silver doors leading from the lobby to The Fumoir and the Claridge’s Restaurant date back to the propery’s Art Deco era when the likes of Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn clinked flutes here. (Queen Victoria liked it before then, but it’s a bit much to ask to drink from her glassware, isn’t it?.)
After being voted best hotel in London by the World’s 50 Best Hotels and a massive refurbishment which involved drilling down five floors into the basement, I had decided it was high time I checked in. Could this really be London’s best stay?
It was 3pm on a Sunday when I visited but the Claridge’s foyer felt like it could be midnight on a Saturday. Three or four different groups were in black tie, heading to various events within the hotel, some to weddings, others for business, some for slap-up lunches. With its original chequered stone flooring, grand staircase and Foyer restaurant replete in period detail, nothing significant has changed since the days when Elizabeth Taylor would have hidden behind dark glasses here. They still do: I’ve seen Madonna and Tom Hanks swoop through the wooden revolving doors and the Queen was famously a fan; she held her Ruby wedding anniversary here. Adam Sandler was so relaxed recently he didn’t even make it into the lobby. He was photographed hanging out on the front steps on his phone. If celebs on the floor outside aren’t an endorsement, I truly don’t know what is.
Like wandering down Petticoat Lane in Shoreditch or along the Mall, Claridge’s hums with a palpable sense of the past; the history feels so tangible that it’s surreal. It’s rare to find such a high amount of original fixtures all in one place, like in the new Claridge’s Restaurant, where ceiling details date back to the 1800s. Throughout the whole ground floor, you feel as though you’re in some fabulous vortex where anything might be possible if you put on enough lippy. There is simply nowhere better to get lost and cosplay your 20s dreams – definitely put on a shirt – but it’s the hotel’s contemporaneity that separates it from the capital’s other grand dames.
As documented on TV show The Mayfair Hotel Megabuild, owners the Maybourne Group recently built a five-story basement extension, giving the building all it needed but hadn’t yet got: a spa, with a decent-sized swimming pool. The Japanese-styled treatment rooms are particularly relaxing. They’re straightforward and modern, but with their curvaceous wood panelling and unfussy feel, they still feel Claridge’s-glamorous.
Read more: Inside the opulent new Claridge’s hotel spa
There are four new floors up top, culminating in the Penthouse but incorporating other suites. I stayed in one of the Mayfair Terrace Suites, overlooking the corners of Brook and Davies Street. It had orb-like furred sofas in an elegant living room and a light but warm cream colour palette, with fussier pops of colour in wallhung artwork and slabs of marble in contrasting tones atop a gigantic bath fit for two. The pièce de résistance is the balcony, though: where in Mayfair do you get a sizeable outdoor spot to yourself? It’s whimsical to sit out there reading a copy of the hotel’s own magazine while looking down at the flags fluttering in the wind above the hotel entrance. You can admire the gorgeous, hand-blown red bricks, each individual to the other, but it’s a must to people-watch the arrivals with a fresh tea in-hand (the minibar, full of British locally sourced supplies, is included.)
I liked how, as a policy, Claridge’s upgrades upon check in to the best available room. I was given a more superior room than I understood I’d be getting, and could hear the couple next to me being upgraded when I arrived. Despite technology’s gains, arriving at hotels is still too often painful. (What on Earth is taking so long?!) But at Claridge’s I was in the door, checked in, and escorted to the lift in under 90 seconds. I wasn’t rushed – we had a good little chat – it was just check-in done efficiently, without the tap-tapping of the keyboard and an endless array of questions. The staff must be treated well; no one smiles like that on bad pay.
We haven’t even spoken about the restaurants: the Foyer, famous for its lobster wellington, is the one to book if you haven’t before. It has the old-age glamour down to a tee, and the sorts of armchairs you don’t such much as sink but dissolve into. Wander next door to The Fumoir for more old-world glamour after, but the Claridge’s Restaurant, with its innovative spins on British classics next door, is somewhere to put a shirt on for. (It’s always good to have a reason to come back.)
There are other great UK hotels. Gleneagles in Scotland is unsurpassed for its range of off-site activities, like lunching with Highland cattle and fishing on your own private loch. But Claridge’s? The building’s renovation isn’t noticeable from the streets – nor the rooms, really. But that’s kind of the point. The place is enigmatic, existing on some magical, mythical level. It certainly draws me back.
Rooms at Claridge’s begin from £930, to book go to the website
