“Kit Kemp’s high couture hotel is the place to be seen in London – smart, playful and charming with a subterranean pool bar.”
A new hotel by Kit Kemp of Firmdale Hotels is always a big, exciting event for us hopeless hotelophiles. The Haymarket is one of London’s hottest boutique hotels. It’s smaller than its predecessor Firmdale, the Soho Hotel , which has 90 rooms to the Haymarket’s 50. It also feels less trendy-hip and more stylish-funky.
There are elegantly groovy ethnic references like Afro-style fabric prints, wood carvings and (exquisitely understated) jungle-print wallpaper. Lots of colour, from barely-there sage to hot pink. There is original artwork everywhere, so no two rooms look alike.
The facilities
Where the Soho Hotel (and the Charlotte Street Hotel) have screening rooms, the Haymarket has a huge, subterranean swimming pool-bar-lounge area, with fairy-tale lighting, which is going to be the place to host parties over the next year or so. Brumus, the small restaurant-bar, serves northern Italian cuisine in a room wrapped in gorgeous printed raspberry wallpaper. The library is correctly English (leather-bound books, comfy sofas) but brilliantly updated with funky fabrics, colours, lighting. The beautiful Shooting Gallery (a listed room which had to be suspended while they built around it) is pure Regency in its proportions.
The rooms
The big buzz here is the Townhouse Suite, a proper English townhouse with five bedrooms, bathrooms and a kitchen, to take whole. There are also three two-bed suites. All rooms, though, are light, spacious and filled with desirable art and objects. Kit’s relentless eye elevates detail to high hotel couture. Though the John Nash building is listed, it was gutted by a fire many years ago. As a result, Kit’s had more or less free rein to rebuild interiors, so there’s none of that poky-misplaced-bathroom feel you can get in other historic buildings.
Everyone will have favourites but we loved the third floor rooms. Painted beams run through them and wraparound windows frame views of haughty stone London buildings. Airy seaside colour schemes (and the porthole windows in room 306) make you feel like you’re sailing a ship through the city.
Address: 1 Suffolk Place, London, England, United Kingdom SW1Y 4BP
Rates from:
GBP 223
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Who stays here
Kirsten Dunst and the Beckhams have checked in here.
Come for
- The townhouse, like a super-suite
- Cocktail parties in the Shooting Gallery
- Drinks poolside in the beautifully lit pool room
Not suitable for
- Hopeless cases - what's not to love?
Awards
"Hot List," Conde Nast 07; "Coolest New Hotels in the World," Conde Nast Traveller 07
Children
The hotel is very family-friendly, and a babysitting service can be arranged on request, as well as extra cots and beds. They recommend the townhouse for interconnecting rooms for families. Brumus restaurant offers a special kids menu and the staff will leave a surprise welcome pack in the room at turndown.
Eating in
Modern Northern Italian is served up in Brumus restaurant, which is cocooned in patterned wallpaper; the idiosyncratic decor may not be to everyone's taste but Kit Kemp fans will love it
