Brown’s Hotel
FRESH BUT COSY, grand but homely: only an establishment as invincibly English as Brown’s could marry its contradictions so beautifully. Opened in 1837, the patina of age imbues it with a uniquely patrician character. It was at Brown’s that Alexander Graham Bell made London’s first telephone call. It was at Brown’s that Rudyard Kipling worked on The Jungle Book. And it’s rumoured to have been Brown’s that inspired Agatha Christie to create the fictitious Bertram’s Hotel. With its open fires, plush-covered sofas and dignified woodwork, the ambience is as reassuring as that of an ancestral seat in the Cotswolds. To check in is to sink in, as one would into a featherbed. Still, there’s nothing in the least bit soporific about Brown’s. Acquired by Sir Rocco Forte in 2003, it was refurbished with such finesse that it gained an air of cheerful modernity that, far from detracting from its illustrious heritage, only enhanced it. On fabrics and wallpapers, flowers bloom at every turn. In Charlie’s, Michelin-starred chef Adam Byatt takes classic British dishes and gives them a contemporary twist. In The Donovan Bar, cocktails by master mixologist Salvatore Calabrese can be sipped to a backdrop of vintage photographs from the heyday of Swinging London.
If it’s true that some places, like some people, improve with the passage of years, then Brown’s, far from being over the hill, is only now in its prime.
See also: Claridge’s, Dukes, Wiltons
