Bulgari Hotel London
A sleek Knightsbridge hotel on the edge of Hyde Park, with the celebrated Bulgari Spa, a 25-metre pool and design notes you will struggle to imitate.
The Bulgari Hotel London is sleek and suave: the sort of hotel from which you take interior-design notes and then quietly despair of ever matching the balance. Opened in 2012 in Knightsbridge, on the edge of Hyde Park, it sits about as well as a London hotel can: breezy afternoon strolls through the park begin at the door.
The rooms are, predictably, gorgeous. But it is the wider facilities that guests tend to rave about long after checkout.
Chief among them is the Bulgari Spa. One of the largest and most exclusive spas in central London, it spans two floors of contemporary Italian design by Antonio Citterio and Patricia Viel (onyx, oak and Vicenza stone) and is comfortably one of the best in the city. A shimmering green-and-gold mosaic pool runs to 25 metres, and the treatment list fuses Asian and European traditions into something genuinely all-encompassing.
Beyond the spa, there is a state-of-the-art fitness centre, the Neville hair and beauty lounge, and a range of bars and restaurants (even a cigar shop), which means a guest is never short of somewhere to be fed or watered.
For a design-literate traveller who wants London luxury at its most composed (central, polished, effortlessly stylish), the Bulgari Hotel London is a confident recommendation. Book time in the spa before you do anything else.
