The Beaumont Hotel

One of London’s boldest luxury hotels takes its inspiration from across the Atlantic — the Beaumont Hotel is meant to evoke the glamour and the rush of a fictional Roaring Twenties New York member’s club. It’s in Mayfair, between Grosvenor Square and Selfridges, and despite its American accent, it’s about as Mayfair as a 21st-century hotel can get, right down to the brash, slightly puzzling piece of quasi-public art that adorns its Twenties Art Deco facade.

The rooms, most of them anyway, are the least surprising thing about the Beaumont, which is not necessarily a criticism when you’re talking about a luxury hotel. They’re subtly stylish, true to their Art Deco intentions, complete with period black-and-white portraits on the walls and ornate marble bathrooms. They feel designed, but in a self-effacing way, studiously avoiding large gestures, feeling more like a well-tailored suit than a show-stopping couture piece. (We’ll get to Antony Gormley’s ROOM in a moment.)

It’s the bar and restaurant, naturally, that come in for a bit more scrutiny. Le Magritte, the bar, perfectly captures the glamour of interwar New York, and comes off genuinely sexy while staying miles on the right side of crass — and there’s little we can say about the Colony Grill Room that hasn’t been said by London’s restaurant critics, some of whom have run fresh out of superlatives in endeavoring to do the place justice.

What’s perhaps most perfectly Mayfair about the Beaumont, oddly enough, might be its artwork — not the portraits that adorn the walls, but the gigantic sculpture by Turner Prize winner Antony Gormley, a sort of crouching Minecraft man, two stories high, which perches like an oversized gargoyle on the corner of the building. The Beaumont is, to our knowledge, the only hotel where you can actually sleep inside a work by a contemporary artist — the interior of that crouching figure is ROOM, a claustrophobically dark oak-clad bedchamber, meant to evoke “a cave, a tomb, a womb or a padded cell,” affixed to an otherwise relatively conventional hotel suite. Whether it’s best viewed as a critique of luxury hospitality, or its zenith, or both, is left as a question for its inhabitants to ponder (to the tune of a couple of thousand quid a night).