Brach Madrid - Evok Collection

Brach Madrid - Evok Collection

On Gran Vía, at number 20, in the seven-storey shell of the old Palacio de Masserano, built between 1919 and 1922 by the architect Jerónimo Pedro Mathet Rodríguez and home as a child to Victor Hugo before it passed, decades later, to the Alfonso dynasty of court photographers, Brach Madrid opened in January 2025 as Evok Collection's first Spanish address and only its second outside Paris, following Brach Paris, Cour des Vosges and Nolinski Paris. The group's co-founder and managing director, Emmanuel Sauvage, chose Gran Vía for the same reason anyone might, its restlessness. Behind a white stone façade that has watched trams, dictatorship and the Movida pass beneath it, the building keeps its original wrought-iron staircase and ground-floor windows, and holds 57 rooms, including four suites with private terraces on the upper floors, each looking out over a different run of the city's rooftops. Philippe Starck, working here as he did at Brach Paris but building outward from Spain rather than repeating himself, has framed the hotel as one man's memory of a woman who never appears in it, with a black-and-white photograph of her tucked into the frame of every mirror in the building. The palette runs jatoba wood, breccia stone and terracotta through rooms finished in deep red, parquet floors and leather headboards, with bathrooms leaning on that same breccia alongside glazed, moss-green terracotta. Brach Le Restaurant, under chef Adam Bentalha, serves Mediterranean cooking from an open kitchen in a room built to recall Madrid's grand cafés of the 1920s, while the bar takes its cue from Spanish village cafés instead, and a glass-fronted patisserie by the entrance sends the smell of pastry into the lobby before you reach reception. Downstairs, the 400-square-metre Spa and Sports Club, La Capsule, has a 20-metre pool under cream marble, a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, a guided ice bath, an infrared sauna and a flotation bath. What it feels like, moving through the building, is less a hotel than someone else's love letter left open on the table, theatrical in the way Starck's rooms tend to be, with sultry lighting and eclectic objects doing much of the emotional work, and the effect lands somewhere between seduction and slight excess depending on your tolerance for both. Gran Vía outside is loud at all hours, cinema queues and cocktail bars and buses, and the hotel doesn't pretend otherwise, it leans into that energy rather than shutting it out, which suits the creative-industry travellers and the couples on a first proper trip together who make up much of its guest list. Staff notice names and small preferences by the second morning, in a way that reads as attentiveness rather than a trained routine. You should not come if you want quiet, Gran Vía does not go quiet, and a hotel built around one designer's fully realised story is a hard sell if you would rather your room said nothing about anyone at all (the five seats around the pool will also test anyone hoping for solitude there on a full house). You should come for the specificity of it, a century-old building handed over entirely to one sustained idea, in a location that puts the Prado, Plaza Mayor and the Thyssen-Bornemisza within easy walking distance, and for a hotel willing to be theatrical rather than tasteful in the safe, forgettable sense. The short version: A Starck-designed five-star on Gran Vía, in a 1922 building once home to Victor Hugo, with 57 rooms, four suites, a Michelin Key and a spa built around a 20-metre pool.