The George Hamburg

The gentrifying and newly hip Hamburg neighborhood of St. Georg is where the George gets its name — and you can bet there’s a sensible reason why they’ve anglicized it. Hamburg’s relationship with England goes back a long way — it’s no accident that the Beatles did their apprenticeship here — and it’s that relationship in particular that the George’s owner and designer sought to underline.

This goes a long way towards explaining why the hotel’s common bear more resemblance to a century-old London gentlemen’s club than a modern-day Continental design hotel. It’s all here — patterned wallpapers, clubby leather chairs, afternoon tea and whisky from the bar. Rooms are slightly more contemporary, mixing some classic English icons with crisp modern fixtures and muted, masculine colors. This is how you achieve unity of style without crossing over into pastiche.

As in any decent British restaurant, the kitchen serves upscale Mediterranean fare (of course we jest). There’s a library which bears a more than passing resemblance to the Drones Club, and on the rooftop there’s a spa which is oddly, charmingly Moroccan in style, surrounded by a terrace with a view over the city. It’s a little jarring, frankly, to look out over the skyline and see not London but Hamburg, the Elbe and not the Thames — it’s a side of Germany you don’t often see, and the George is the ideal vantage from which to see it.