Olga Polizzi's redesign of the London's legendary Browns Hotel has introduced a modern feel whilst retaining the discreet atmosphere of this quintessentially English classic.
I f walls could talk, the oak-panelled corridors of Browns would be able to make a fortune selling their stories to today's tabloids. But Browns has always been an altogether more discreet affair than that. And so it remains today. In renovating the hotel into their London flagship, Rocco Forte Hotels have managed to bring a 170-year old hotel into the 21st century, whilst retaining the rareified atmosphere for which it is renowned.
When Browns was first launched in 1837, hotels were very different entities to those which exist today. They didn't have lifts, public dining rooms or telephones, and it was Browns that first introduced these innovations to the hotel world. But the hotel's biggest departure from the norm was its atmosphere.
With its air of discerning, private luxury Browns was a world away from the coaching inns and guesthouses that had hitherto defined the hotel experience in the 19th century.
European royalty often fled here to escape troubles at home (Napoleon III stayed here after fleeing France following the Franco-Prussian War). American presidents honeymooned in its suites. Famous authors either wrote books whilst resident in the hotel (Rudyard Kipling's 'Jungle Book') or based the settings for their novels on it (Agatha Christie's 'At Bertrams Hotel'.)
Architecturally, Browns is actually an amalgamation of several different townhouse buildings, whose life as a hotel began in 1837 when James Brown - butler to Lord Byron - acquired 23 Dover Street, expanding into numbers 21, 22 and 24 over the following year.
In 1859, John James Ford took over the hotel, soon making it one of the first hotels to have a lift, electricity and fixed basins installed. Thirty years later, with his son Henry ensconced as manager, Ford acquired St George's Hotel on Albemarle Street.
This hotel backed on to Brown's and was soon merged into the existing Dover Street building to create one big hotel with an additional fifth floor. In 1905 three more townhouses were acquired and incorporated into the hotel, allowing further structural alterations and expansion.
The Fords focused on creating a private hotel, where premier guests would be undisturbed and able to enjoy homely comforts as well as the standards of service to which they were accustomed. They also introduced a public dining room - another innovation for hotels of the era, where guests had traditionally dined in their own rooms.
Even today, there is something cossetting, comforting and safe about the residential feel of these former townhouses. Perhaps this is why so many politicians and royals have used the hotel as a bolthole when seeking sanctuary from war or political exile. Queen Elizabeth of the Belgians resided at Browns Hotel throughout World War One, as did Greek exile King George II of Hellenes from 1924 to 1935. In 1936 Haile Selassi, Emperor of Ethiopia, stayed at the hotel, escaping Mussolini's incursions into his country. In 1939 another victim of Mussolini, King Zog of Albania, checked in.
It was a different kind of exile from which Sir Rocco Forte returned in 2003, following the bitter takeover battle for his father's company Trusthouse Forte.
There must have been some sweet sense of justice when Forte, having successfully launched his new luxury collection of Rocco Forte Hotels, re-acquired Browns - a hotel which had originally been purchased by Trusthouse Ltd back in 1968.
Granada had sold it to Raffles in 1996 during their break-up of the Forte empire. But eight years later, Sir Rocco had secured the purchase of the hotel and the task of reinvigorating it fell to his sister, Olga Polizzi, as Director of Design for RF Hotels.
A £19m, two year refurbishment programme followed, with the hotel reopening in December 2005.
The style is described as "contemporary and comfortable" and throughout, Polizzi has been at pains to maintain the refined English charm for which Browns is famous. Elements of the original hotel have thus been retained - most notably those wooden panels in the lobby and restaurant, the stained-glass windows behind the bar, and the Jacobean detailed plaster ceiling of the Grill restaurant.
But other features - the Bill Amberg-designed leather reception desk, moss green banquettes and mosaic flooring - lend it a modern touch.
The Terence Donovan Bar - inspired by the Helmut Newton Bar in Berlin, pays homage to the celebrated British photographer and is lined with his iconic prints. The new bar - also designed by Bill Amberg - has been enlarged and furnishings are contemporary with wooden floors, black leather seating and dark country check banquettes.
In the bedrooms, colour schemes vary from bold red and mocha, to more subdued moss-greens and taupes but throughout Polizzi and her team have excelled in recreating the hotel's residential atmosphere. On the one hand this has required clever spatial planning to maximise the amount of furniture within each room without it ever feeling cramped (not that these are small rooms, the suites weighing in at an average 95m2.) But the devil is in the detail and it's the photoshoot-perfect arrangement of the smaller design elements (books, lamps, vases, bowls of fruit and so on) alongside the subtle layering of materials and patterns (silks, linens and wools; plains, stripes and checks) that gives it that quintessentially English, home-from-home feel. It's like the city abode of a country gentleman.
As you'd expect from Rocco Forte hotels, the bathrooms are large too, with luxurious bush-hammered limestone walls, mosaic-tiled floors, double showers and wall-mounted flat-screen televisions.
Tinkering with a classic hotel like Browns is a difficult feat to pull off, but RF Hotels appear to have managed it. There are enough references to tradition to keep the Browns-faithful happy. Institutions such as the carving trolley and afternoon tea remain, albeit enhanced with a modern twist (they now cater for the full range of modern day dietary foibles).
This 'classic-with-a-twist' ethos applies equally to the interiors. For all the painstaking restoration of the wood-panelling, the artworks that adorn the walls (many of them by modern masters such as Bridget Riley and Ivon Hitchens) are distinctly contemporary. Whisper it quietly, but Browns is back.
