Hotel description

About Charlotte Street Hotel:

r />The Charlotte Street Hotel is a luxury boutique hotel situated in London's media neighbourhood just north of Soho. The Charlotte Street Hotel is a minute's walk from leafy Soho Square and the theatre district, within easy reach of the financial centre and is surrounded by some of London's most vibrant bars, restaurants and cafes.

Tablet Hotels review:

Think back, if you will, to the Bloomsbury set: Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, EM Forster, Roger Fry — they lived the perfect bohemian life with houses in the city and the country, lofty aesthetic goals, not so much money as to lose their social consciousness but more than enough to afford a gardener. Enter Charlotte Street, a 21st century reinvention of the perfect Bloomsbury London pad. This is not a design hotel, all white beds and chrome lights — rather, it's early twentieth-century England.

The Bloomsbury legend, by the way, has succeeded more as hotel venture than as art. While the fickle British press was mixed on the Tate exhibition, it raved about the Charlotte Street Hotel. After all Virginia's sister Vanessa Bell and her lover Duncan Grant, with their gorgeous Deco fireplaces and teacups, were arguably as much decorators and hosts as they were artists. This building, once a pharmacy, today sports interiors of which the Bloomsberries would have no doubt approved; these spaces are light, airy and full of wit, with curlicued wallpaper, four-poster beds and vases in brightly colored vases. In the drawing rooms, paintings by Bell, Grant, and Roger Fry brighten the walls. There's even a movie house that seats 67 in lipstick red leather cushions amidst pinstriped walls.

The bathrooms are luxurious with walk-in showers and square tubs, and the beds, if not the widest, are easily the softest in the city — and the owners, Kit and Tim Kemp, are not shy about telling you how many times they have been test-driven overnight by the staff.

But you'll hear no such stories about the guests, as Charlotte Street is nothing if not discreet. No wonder, then, that this place is so popular among the trans-Atlantic smart set, counting Meg Ryan as a repeat visitor. But celebrity or not, you'll appreciate the genuinely English-Bohemian warmth, epitomized perfectly by the bar policy, which is one of honour. It's just how the Bloomsbury crowd, with their progressive ideals, would have run this place.