A new building on an old square
Hanover Square lies at the northern edge of Mayfair, just below Oxford Street, and it is one of the older squares of the West End, laid out early in the eighteenth century and named for the royal house that had lately come to the throne. St George's, the church a few steps south on St George Street, went up at much the same time and has married a good part of London society since. Until recently the square was better known for its offices than for anything that happened in it after six o'clock.
The hotel opened on the square in June 2024, its group's second house in London. The building is new, designed by Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners and faced in a burnt red brick, and it is one of very few entirely new buildings that Mayfair has seen in years. Its guest rooms were designed by Studio Indigo in greens, maroons and turquoise, and the lobby is lined with a rare green marble. It is a modern house that has taken real trouble to sit comfortably among much older neighbours.
Fifty rooms and a great many neighbours
The hotel keeps only fifty rooms and suites. The rest of the building is given over to private residences, seventy seven of them, which makes the whole thing closer to an apartment house with a hotel inside it than to a hotel with a few flats attached. That proportion shapes the evening more than any single room could. The corridors are short, the lifts are seldom crowded, and a building in which most of the doors belong to people who live there has the settled quiet of a private address rather than the traffic of a grand hotel.
It suits a guest who wants a hotel's service with an apartment's calm, and it suits a whole night better than a single hour. The square empties when the offices close, the streets to the south are quiet well before midnight, and in the morning there is a spa below ground with a twenty five metre pool for anybody who would rather begin the day with a swim than with the newspapers.
Beside the Elizabeth line
The practical advantage of the address is underground. The Elizabeth line entrance to Bond Street station opens onto Hanover Square itself, so a guest can come in from Heathrow on a single train and be at the hotel's door within a few minutes of stepping off it. For somebody flying in for two nights of meetings, that is worth a great deal, and it is the reason a good many of the people who write to this house from the square are on the first evening of a short stay.
Above ground the position is just as useful. Bond Street and its shops are a few minutes west, Oxford Circus is closer still, and Conduit Street and Savile Row lie a short walk to the south. A guest with a fitting on the Row in the morning will find the whole business described in the letter on commissioning a suit, and the hotel is about as convenient a base for it as Mayfair provides.
The dining rooms, described rather than recommended
The hotel's restaurant fills a tall room under a skylit roof, reached by a spiral staircase in marble, and it is a genuinely handsome space in which to eat. It opened in 2024 under a well known chef who left the following summer, and the hotel has run it since. Because its name and its menu have already changed once, I describe the room here rather than the cooking, and I would suggest you look at what it is serving in the week you arrive.
The choice, in practice, is between staying in and walking out. Dinner in the building suits a guest who has flown in that afternoon and has no wish to see another street. Dinner in Mayfair proper, ten minutes' walk away, suits a guest who wants the evening to feel like London. Either way the night comes back to the same quiet corridor.
How it differs from its sister on the park
The older of the two stands at the edge of Hyde Park in Knightsbridge, in a large Victorian building of red brick and stone that has been the group's London house since 2000. It is a grand hotel in the full sense: a big lobby, a long frontage, rooms that look out over the park, and the bustle of Knightsbridge on the far side of the door. An evening there feels like an occasion, which is exactly why some guests choose it.
Hanover Square offers almost the opposite. It is small, new, quiet after dark and faces a garden square rather than a park. For a guest who wants a view and a sense of ceremony, the Knightsbridge house is the better choice. For one who wants to be left entirely alone, a short walk from Bond Street, the Row and the Elizabeth line, the Mayfair house suits rather better. Both are simply hotels to this house: there is no arrangement with either, and your companion arrives at each as your guest and nothing more.
A night there, from dinner to breakfast
A hotel of this size is made for dinner until morning: ten hours at £1,800, beginning at the table and ending after coffee, with no other name written beside yours in the diary. Every shorter length is set out on the tariff, and the fee is handed to your companion in person when she knocks. With fifty rooms and a desk that sees every face, the arrival I would suggest is the simplest one: tell reception that a guest will ask for you by name.
For a modern building of this kind I often think first of the statuesque women of the circle. Samanta lives five minutes from Conduit Street, dresses with an architect's discipline and would notice the building before she noticed the menu. Karolina is long limbed, very still, and at her best in a good room. Milena takes one evening a night and prefers it to run well past midnight, which makes her a natural choice for a night that is not meant to end early.
One line of the presentations carries most of the names above, and that line is statuesque.
Alongside it
Tonight
Put it to use
What this letter describes takes one written line to set in motion, and Booking shows how little there is to it.