Hotel hit squad The Beaumont
Its art-deco interiors may have had a facelift, but the Beaumont has retained its 1930s spirit, says Mark C O’Flaherty
One of the things I love most in a hotel is a good old-fashioned sweeping pointer indicator. You know, those semi-circular dials above lift doors with a single sculpted wand that illustrates, in real time, ascent and descent. The stuff of cartoons, farce and gangster movies, they are a feature of the Beaumont, originally conceived in 2014 by restaurateurs Chris Corbin and Jeremy King – best known for the fabulous Wolseley and heinous Brasserie Zédel – to bring updated 1930s glamour to a residential square south of Selfridges.
The hotel was fashioned out of an artdeco building, and played up to its heritage, but with good taste rather than pastiche. Like everything the pair do, it had presence, and felt like it had forever been an integral part of the city. The duo departed in 2018, and the hotel was closed for most of the past year for a refurb. The sweeping pointer indicators remain, as does the air of glamour, and the style of service where the staff greet you by name.
I’ve been a big fan of the Colony Grill Room at the hotel since it first opened.
It has that glorious but rare three-martini-lunch and supper club atmosphere; the sort of place you would take your mum and dad for steak tartare, as much as it is somewhere you would see someone “in fashion”. The last time I had dinner here was on a date with my husband. At the end of the meal I surprised him with a key to ROOM, the Antony Gormley-designed suite upstairs that is an immersive art experience as much as a place to stay. Everything about the space is in tune with the rest of the hotel, in a luxe-trad kind of way, apart from the bedroom itself – accessed via a bathroom that Gormley conceived as an ante chamber to undress and purify. It’s both sepulchral and sexy; ascetic and strangely sinister, like a scene from Under the Skin in which Scarlett Johansson may emerge from the shadows and do something unspeakable, but you would probably enjoy it. There’s a stark white bed that appears to glow from the centre of a lofty, dark space. As your eyes adjust, you begin to make out graphic architectural shapes above you, defined on the exterior of the building as a human figure in cubist form. As date nights go, you can’t pull much more of a blinder by spending a grand to book it.
On my recent post-refurb stay at the hotel I was in a regular room, a fraction of the price but still with the same lacquered wood deco furniture, a marble bathroom, and a terrace with a view to the east skyline of the city. There have been no radical changes in the hotel, but everything felt freshly minted.
There is the same graphic, classic monochrome deco interior with touches of scarlet, but a few things have been tweaked for better and worse. The biggest improvement is the shift of the bar from what felt like a corridor into the restaurant to a bigger space. The old bar is now the Gatsby Room, which does afternoon tea. It’s a good fit, but I’ll never go because afternoon tea isn’t cocktails. The main bar is now in what was once a guests-only lounge off the side of the lobby, rechristened Le Magritte. It has waiters in white doublebreasted dinner jackets and walls covered with monochrome photographs of the Rat Pack. Is there any cultural cool mileage left in Sinatra et al? Little, if any, but the whole thing still feels swank, with wood panelling and light fixtures that resemble cut diamonds.
The Colony Grill remains staffed by what I would call “big” personalities, and it’s still all about soft lighting and banquettes you never want to vacate. There are two changes, however, that I can’t come to terms with. The first is the new mural that wraps around the room replacing the old black-and-white portraits of Hollywood stars, but which looks like a cheap knock-off of a David Hockney landscape. The second is the disappearance of welsh rarebit from the menu. All the standard grill fare is still on there, but welsh rarebit is a badge of civilisation for a certain kind of oldschool dining experience.
Still, what remains is good – particularly a buttermilk mash that is up there with the late Joël Robuchon’s pommes purée in terms of the ratio of dairy to starch; and bananas foster, served ablaze next to your table. Every hotel should have sweeping pointer indicators, and every restaurant should have a dish that involves incendiary theatre. Art deco was originally conceived as something exhilarating and fun, which makes the Beaumont, still, authentic to the core.
Rooms from £470 including breakfast. There are four accessible rooms