The Portobello Hotel

The Portobello Hotel

Alice Cooper kept a boa constrictor in the bathtub. Johnny Depp and Kate Moss filled theirs with champagne and stayed for several days. Damon Albarn worked behind the bar. Tina Turner loved the hotel so much she bought the house next door. The Portobello has been the bolthole of choice for the music and fashion world since 1971, when it opened in two Victorian townhouses on a quiet street just off Westbourne Grove, and the accumulated weight of its guest list is part of what you are buying when you book a room here. Twenty-one individually designed bedrooms, no two the same, each filled with antiques sourced from the Portobello Market two minutes away, wall-to-wall frescoes, gilded ceilings, Bird of Audubon wallpaper, and in the Exceptional Room, a circular bed veiled in gauze and a Victorian bathing contraption of golden pipes and taps that looks like something from a Steampunk fever dream. Most TVs have been removed deliberately, the coffee machines are hidden behind moving bookshelves, and the honesty bar in the drawing room runs on Portobello Road gin and the kind of trust that feels appropriate in a hotel of this particular character. The neighbourhood does the rest: the market on Saturdays from nine, Kensington Gardens within walking distance, Notting Hill Gate tube a few minutes on foot, and a stretch of Westbourne Grove and Portobello Road lined with the kind of restaurants and bars that make the question of where to eat feel genuinely pleasurable rather than stressful. This is not a hotel for people who want a spa, a restaurant, and a concierge who books everything. It is a hotel for people who want Notting Hill to feel like it belongs to them for a few days, who find the idea of a room with a gilded ceiling and a secret cocktail bar more appealing than a room with a view and a minibar, and who understand that some of the best hotels in London do not feel like hotels at all. Short version: London's original rock and roll hotel, open since 1971 in two Victorian townhouses in Notting Hill, with 21 individually designed rooms full of Portobello Market antiques, a honesty bar in the drawing room, and a guest history that includes Johnny Depp, Kate Moss, and Alice Cooper's boa constrictor.