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Tucked away behind London’s Bayswater station, La Suite West hotel is housed in one of those buildings conjured up in the mind of Americans when they imagine our fair city. On a quiet street of enormous town-houses faced in white, with carefully manicured bushes and elegant ironmongery, one imagines that hidden behind the polite facade is a well-to-do family and their governess, Mary Poppins.
And indeed, as we sit eating our breakfast in La Suite West (eggs however you want them, perfect white linen), a twin-set sporting mother and her clearly uninterested husband (constant mobile phone calls, forgetting his children’s ages) are sitting on the adjacent table interviewing a would-be nanny to their eldest (Tarquin, presumably). Clearly this hotel isn’t touting the God-Save-the Queen/Shoreditch cool flavour of London, but the newly domestic Kate-and-Wills meets Gwyneth-and-Chris side of things.
That said, the sober clientele and the silence – extraordinary in central London – are not accompanied, as one might expect, by chintz. But, rather, by a slick and surprisingly contemporary backdrop courtesy of actress turned interior designer-slash-hotelier, Anouska Hempel.
To be perfectly honest, before my stay at La Suite West I wasn’t expecting huge things from the interiors. Japanese-influenced with a largely monochrome palette is a look which has been done before, and badly. You can’t argue, however, with quality, and this is where this hotel comes into its own. It is thoughtfully put together and immaculately executed, its pared-back minimalism and quiet discretion setting it apart from ordinary themed hotel styling.
Approached from a side-entrance, so well-hidden that both my partner and I miss it when we arrive separately, the reception space signals the simple but luxurious look of the entire hotel. A long, white marble desk separates the guests from the hotel staff who, dressed in black, with tied back hair, greet me in the hushed tones of a south-east Asian spa. They then assign me to an equally quiet concierge to conduct me, via a black-walled warren of corridors, to our room.
Each of the bedrooms incorporates beautiful joinery: black timber sliding screens disguise the functional elements of the space – a mini-kitchen, the wardrobe – while a four-poster bed frame feels luxurious, without over-crowding the space in the relatively small town-house room.
As regular Glass-readers will know, I’m a sucker for a marble bathroom and this one doesn’t fail to delight. Clad in veined-white from floor to ceiling, it completes the Zen look. Were it not, in fact, for the awkwardly-designed bath-surround – more marble – making it impossible to lie back in the bath, this bathroom might have made it into my top five.
After an hour or so of “retreating” in the quiet of our Japanese room, we are treated to a meal in the hotel’s restaurant. Like the rest of La Suite West, the space is somewhat deserted, with couples whispering to one-another in dark and sexy mood-lighting. The food – a tapas-style selection of “haute cuisine” – is as serious and immaculate as the styling. Plump and juicy king-prawns arrive hanging from an elegant sculptural frame and – in the polite quietness of the restaurant – my partner and I stifle our giggles as we try to remove said prawns from their wire skewer without firing them across the room. And while each dish that arrives is more complexly curated than the previous – all are exquisite and all are delicious.
When it comes to leave the hotel in the morning, climbing onto the packed Saturday-morning tube, the hours spent in La Suite West feel like a world away from the frenzy of London and it dawns on us exactly how relaxing our short stay in the hotel has been. It is something of a cliché to describe a Japanese-styled hotel as a sanctuary, but sometimes – and certainly in this case – only a cliché does it justice.
by Emilie Lemons