Detailed Review
The Soho Hotel is situated near leafy Soho Square in a quiet street between Wardour and Dean Streets. The area is the heart of London's entertainment and creative community and is surrounded by some of London's best restaurants and bars, vibrant cafes and most exciting theatre and nightlife.
There are two large drawing rooms for use by in-house guests. Each is furnished in a dramatic individual style, has a log-burning fireplace and its own honesty bar.
There are 85 bedrooms and suites as well as 6 private apartments. All are individually designed in a contemporary English style by Kit Kemp. They are fully equipped with all the facilities expected by the modern traveller, including high speed internet access, flat screen LCD TVs and DVD/CD players. Bathrooms are luxuriously designed in granite and oak with walk-in showers, double basins and exclusive bath products by London perfumer Miller Harris. There are four fifth-floor penthouses with tree-lined terraces and views across London.
Press Quotes
"One of London’s most acclaimed new properties is Soho Hotel... its imaginative decor attracts a very hip crowd in the public bars and restaurant." Independent 06
Independent Reviews
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"Style savvy and highly fashionable, the hotel also has a trendy Soho address - but we'd expect nothing less from a Firmdale."
Two vast suites with great London views, the Terrace and Soho Suites, are amongst the best guest spaces in London. Sumptuous fabrics mix with eclectic objets in postmodern fashion to create an excellent addition to the London hotel scene.
The Soho Hotel
By Jamie Dunford Wood
Opened in September 2004 the Soho Hotel is the latest in the onward march of Tim and Kit Kemp’s all-conquering Firmdale Group. Apparently Kit likes to swap around furnishings between her hotels - the Soho, Charlotte Street, The Pelham and the rest; fed up with seeing a sofa in one of the public rooms, she has plenty of other spaces in which to refresh it in other parts of London. It is this attention to detail that marks out these hotels, and the Soho is no exception. Where other hoteliers will use specialist hotel furnishing companies to kit out the basics - like the hanging cupboards - to a budget, the Kemps keep tight control over everything, ensuring that the units are solidly built out of chunky wood with just the right satisfying clunk when you say goodnight to your Prada for the evening. No wonder they won’t tell you what it cost - they don’t want you to think about anything so subjective as ’value’, they just want to get it right according to their own set of demanding principles. Furnishings might not be to everyone’s tastes - purists might baulk at the postmodern fusion of traditional English landscapes, free-standing manequins and pink fabrics - but you could never say it has not been done with care, thought and commitment. The result is supremely tasteful, bearing in might that you ARE in the heart of Soho. Above all, there is a feeling of warmth. Everything smells good, of thick carpeting, and the rooms are quiet. Only those on the fourth and fifth floors have anything approaching good views over rooftops, but even where rooms don’t - for example those that stare into neighbouring flats and offices, the warehouse-style windows are large enough to let in floods of light. Beds are canopied in drapes, while each room sports a manequin - a Kemp theme. Most rooms have separate power showers, and all boast Tivoli radios, DVDs, ’health conscious’ minibars (with scented candles) and flatscreen TVs - the apartment-style suites even have second ones at the foot of the freestanding bathtubs. Background colours are neutral and calming. Downstairs you are left in no doubt you are at the centre of the action. The restaurant buzzes with local media-land Wardour Street worthies, while others drift in and out of one of the two magnificent screening rooms - the 100-seater with seats of vibrant Ferrari red, the 45 seater with sofas and armchairs and arm rests to accomodate nuts and champagne, and in real (shh..) pony-skins. The sitting room and library are perfect for slobbing out, and there’s a well stocked honesty bar. Elsewhere in the public areas pebbled columns mix with old worn carpenters tables, seats and benches crafted from ’found’ wood, and a leather exercise horse that looks like it’s seen the underside of every Prime Minister since Peel. Pale wood - bleached and limed, is everywhere. There’s also a small gym with treatment rooms.
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