Relais And Chateaux Orfila

Relais And Chateaux Orfila

The Chamberí district is the Madrid that Madrid lives in. North of the Gran Vía and west of the Paseo de la Castellana, it is a neighbourhood of wide residential streets, elegant 19th-century apartment buildings, and a density of neighbourhood restaurants and wine bars that caters almost entirely to locals rather than visitors. The market at Vallehermoso, the museum of Romanticism on San Mateo, the Museum of Naturalism a few streets away, the particular energy of the Alonso Martínez junction where Chamberí meets the city's more central pulse: this is the Madrid that people who live in Madrid tend to be proud of. The Prado is a fifteen-minute walk south. The Retiro is a kilometre away. The Salamanca district, the city's finest shopping address, is across the Castellana. It is an address that signals a certain kind of knowledge about the city, the knowledge that the residential version is more interesting than the tourist-facing one. Hotel Orfila opened in 1886 in a small palace on Calle de Orfila, a quiet tree-lined street in the heart of Chamberí, and joined the Relais & Châteaux collection within a year of opening. It remains one of the smallest and most quietly distinguished properties in the portfolio: 32 rooms and suites, twelve of them suites, all individually decorated with period furnishings, antique furniture, marble bathrooms, and the kind of accumulated character that comes from a building that has been a hotel for nearly 140 years and has never tried to be anything else. The rooms look over either the internal garden courtyard or the peaceful street outside, and the silence at night is the silence of a residential neighbourhood rather than a managed quietude. The patio garden, where a trompe l'oeil of climbing plants creates the illusion of a much larger green space, is one of the lovelier spots in central Madrid for breakfast or an afternoon drink. The restaurant El Jardín de Orfila, under chef Mario Sandoval who holds two Michelin stars, serves a gastronomic tasting menu rooted in traditional Spanish cuisine elevated by contemporary technique. The guests are those for whom the intimate, residential version of a luxury hotel holds more appeal than any palace on a boulevard, who want to be in the Madrid that Madrileños live in rather than the one the guidebooks describe, and who consider 32 rooms and a Relais & Châteaux kitchen a more compelling proposition than a hundred rooms and a famous name. It closes for three weeks every August for its annual restoration. The short version: A 32-room Relais & Châteaux hotel in a 19th-century palace on a quiet residential street in Chamberí, Madrid's most elegant neighbourhood district. Individually decorated rooms with period furnishings and antique pieces, a garden courtyard with trompe l'oeil greenery, and a two-Michelin-star restaurant under chef Mario Sandoval. Five minutes from the Prado, in the Madrid that locals live in. One of the quietest and most considered addresses in the city.