Charlotte Street London Luxury Hotel

Detailed Review

Charlotte Street Hotel is situated just north of Soho. It comprises 52 luxurious bedrooms and suites as well as the restaurant Oscar, a gym, a private screening room and several meeting rooms. Every bedroom is perfectly appointed with the modern traveller in mind - CD, DVD and VCRs, two-line telephone with voicemail, modem and fax point, cellular telephone, safe, mini bar and large desks. Bathrooms are designed in solid granite and oak with mini colour TVs, double basins, deep bath tubs and walk-in showers. The interiors, designed by Kit Kemp, reflect a fresh, modern English style. A "Bloomsbury set" theme has been used in many of the rooms and the drawing rooms are in the spirit of Bloomsbury painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, who were influenced by Matisse and some of the more colourful French painters.

Press Quotes

"...almost faultless service, combined with the modern art, slick clientele, good food, and sophisticated ambience make for a stylish urban retreat." Times 06

Independent Reviews

The Charlotte Street Hotel
By Angela Moore

The Charlotte Street Hotel is one of Kit Kemp’s growing family of designer babies. Most recently, of course, she and husband Tim opened the Soho Hotel – the vibrant, slightly naughty younger sister. Charlotte Street is more like the successful businesswoman of the family – beautifully groomed and radiating effortless, understated elegance.

Downstairs, there’s a long, simple reception hall, which leads through to Oscar’s, the bar and restaurant, on the left. Charlotte Street is in the media-land north of Soho and Oscar’s is often filled with BAFTA winners chatting up production company bosses – it’s buzzy but it makes for a fair amount of traffic through reception. The drawing room and library at the end of the reception hall are more private spaces but you’d have to retreat to your room to guarantee any undisturbed privacy. The basement screening room, with its smart pinstriped walls and luxurious red leather chairs, runs a popular Sunday night Film Club.

Kit’s impeccable eye is everywhere. Wallpaper is textured and patterned; whimsical antique pieces mix in with contemporary paintings and sculpture. Colours are muted pastels, umbers and slates. The drawing room is inspired by the Bloomsbury set and there are Roger Fry, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell paintings on the walls. Everything feels perfectly unpretentious, confident and at ease with itself.

The rooms
There are 52 bedrooms at Charlotte Street and each has its own personality, though they have in common a fresh English chic. Because it’s an old building, there are little oddities – convoluted corridors and twisted flights of stairs – that add immeasurably to the character of the place. One basic double room is liberally decked out in Toile wallpaper in burgundy and white, to match the bedcovers. It’s spacious enough and has the standard London Mary Poppins-style rooftop-and-street views. Superior doubles, though, are far more fun. The deep beds are hung with half-canopies in different styles – one room has a demure African theme and a canopy is fringed with guinea fowl feathers. There’s generally enough room for a sofa, a pair of armchairs and Brancusi-inspired desks. The penthouse is an open-plan wonder; it pulls off feeling like an attic room without being cramped, and feeling like a separate sitting room and bedroom without using walls. Throughout, bathrooms are brisk and made of granite and oak.

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• Charlotte Street Hotel
  By The TI Review Team

  Rebecca Stumpf writes: Opened in 2000, the Charlotte Street Hotel (one of the Firmdale hotels owned and designed by Kit and Tim Kemp) attracts media and entertainment types to its Noho address while carefully guarding its low-key atmosphere. The airy lobby, fronted by a Botero dog keen on playing the mascot, has welcoming oak floors and warm side paneling. The hotel’s brasserie ‘Oscar’ is visible through paned glass to the left and a cheery drawing room and library are tucked away at the lobby’s end beyond the check-in desk. The library is a nice example of the Kemp overall aesthetic; that is, a private and visually interesting space – think engraved, Victorian-style marble fireplace topped with a Rothko-esque painting of two charcoal black rectangles rolled across a fire-red canvas (it’s design moves like this that keep prudishness at bay). Keeping up with the other Firmdale Hotels, Charlotte Street has a theme, and Kit has kitted out an array of rooms inspired by the Bloomsbury Group. The hotel’s collection of original art include pieces by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, well blended with modern details such as the aforementioned Botero pup and a mural of 21st-century London life that brightens the walls of ‘Oscar’. Other Kemp touches you can count on? Bedrooms equipped with delightfully chunky furnishings (in the smaller doubles the furniture has a slightly Alice-in-Wonderland, oversized quality), individually designed curtained bed heads, functionally stoic granite and oak bathrooms with deep tubs (and mini TVs), and all the necessary mod cons. Hallways are a little close and labyrinth-like, but on the upside this enhances the feeling of discovery upon opening the door into a bright, well-appointed room.
  
  Especially convenient for Charlotte Street’s clientele (although this goes for other Firmdale Hotels as well) are the hotel’s intimate meeting spaces and private, state-of-the-art screening room, a sexy entrepreneurial touch found at the Covent Garden and Soho Hotel as well. As for general ‘bang for your buck’, Charlotte Street falls in the middle of the Kemp range – less of a bank roll than Covent Garden or Soho Hotel but slightly more of an investment than the Pelham, Number 16, or Knightsbridge.

  © Travel Intelligence. All rights reserved

• “The flawless decor is calm, contemporary English and Oscar’s is always busy - one of our favourite London boutique hotels.”

  Good sister hotel to the Soho Hotel, but with not much in the way of views - only the Penthouse and the junior suites, with Charlotte Street views, avoid the office environs. Still, a supremely comfortable and media friendly hotel in a great part of town.