Brown's Hotel by Rocco Forte Hotels

Brown's Hotel by Rocco Forte Hotels

Brown's Hotel, a Rocco Forte Hotel, on Albemarle Street in Mayfair, with a second entrance onto Dover Street where it all began. James Brown and Sarah Willis, formerly valet and maid to Lord and Lady Byron, opened the first of it in 1837 at number 23 Dover Street, and over the following decades the hotel spread sideways through eleven adjoining Georgian townhouses until it became the single building it is today. James John Ford took over in 1859 and installed what is generally reckoned to be London's first hotel restaurant; the Ford family ran the place for close to a century before it passed through Raffles ownership and, in July 2003, into the hands of Rocco Forte Hotels, who spent two years and £24 million restoring it before reopening in December 2005. It holds 115 rooms and suites across the townhouses, no two configured quite alike, and it remains, by the Forte family's own account, a family concern: Sir Rocco Forte oversees the group, his sister Lady Olga Shawcross (formerly Polizzi) redesigned the interiors, and her children Lydia, Irene and Charles now sit across design, skincare and hospitality within the wider business. The rooms, reworked by Olga Shawcross across two decades of incremental change, keep original fireplaces and cornicing where they survive and pair them with contemporary upholstery rather than pastiche, with marble bathrooms stocked in Irene Forte Skincare, made from organic Sicilian ingredients. Downstairs, The Drawing Room has served afternoon tea since the middle of the nineteenth century in a wood-panelled room refitted with Paul Smith's take on English tailoring; Charlie's, the hotel's main restaurant, is named for Lord Charles Forte and serves British cooking with a French classical backbone, having previously traded under Heinz Beck and, before him, Mark Hix. The Donovan Bar takes its name and its walls from Terence Donovan, whose black and white photography from 1960s London hangs throughout, and the subterranean spa runs to three treatment rooms, one fitted for couples, each with its own shower and heated bed. What Brown's does, better than most of Mayfair's grander hotels, is convince you that little has changed since Kipling sat writing at the desk that still stands in the Dover Suite, while quietly running on modern service standards underneath. It suits the guest who wants London's clubbable, literary, slightly hushed version of luxury rather than its glass-and-marble one, who would rather take a pot of Assam in a panelled room than sit under an atrium, and who does not mind that half the other guests in the lobby look as though they have been coming since the Fords ran the place. It is busy, especially at teatime and around the West End's pre-theatre hours, and the traffic through the lobby can feel more like a members' club at rush hour than a discreet retreat. You should not come if you want white-cube minimalism, a hotel that photographs primarily for its architecture, or total anonymity; the panelling and the history are what the place is built on, not incidental to it, and there is no getting away from either. You should come for a hotel that still feels like a London townhouse rather than a hotel built to resemble one, that will do a proper afternoon tea without apologising for it, and that puts you two minutes from Bond Street with a bar that has better photography on its walls than most small galleries. The short version: A five-star Mayfair institution across eleven Georgian townhouses, open since 1837, run by the Forte family since 2003, with 115 rooms, Kipling's writing desk, and an English Tea Room that predates most of London's afternoon tea competition by a century.