Brown’s hotel review: How I ruined my kids by staying at London’s oldest hotel
You don’t mean to ruin your children.
It happens quietly — like tooth decay or the current rise of fascism.
One moment you’re a responsible parent introducing them to the world and to Bluey and the next, you’ve gone and booked Brown’s and obliterated any hope they’ll ever find joy in a Novotel again.
This happened a few years back — me smugly believing that exposing the family to the best of London’s Mayfair and a powerful hit of contemporary history and culture would somehow breed gratitude.
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By continuing you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy.Instead, it bred snobbery. Because once an 11-year-old’s been ushered into an expansive suite where staff have lined the walls of their bedrooms with live floral arrangements lifted from The Jungle Book, each bed gifting a personalised edition of the same novel — Brown’s being where Rudyard Kipling penned his best-known work — it changes things.
“We need a doorman at home . . . with that funny hat too,” chimed the nine-year-old at one stage. “I like him because he knows my name.”
Then there’s room service that magically lands and includes a three-course kids menu (hello sirloin steak and warm cinnamon donuts), not to mention a lavish daily breakfast of hand-squeezed orange juice, kaleidoscopic fruit platter and crab omelette.
Everything that comes after is decline, decay, compromise.
I took them to the outer reaches of the Victorian high country — a lovingly restored farmhouse with views across a Tom Roberts landscape and sharp silence.
The kids surveyed it with the disdain of a French waiter watching a table of Americans butter bread.
In Sydney, a gleaming harbourside hotel failed as “it lacked soul”, while a question regarding the whereabouts of doormen has been laid across the front mat of every Airbnb.
My attachment to Brown’s extends to the near past and a time of London poverty — in my 20s I was fascinated by the place and the opportunity to sit within this breathing slice of history — this being the capital’s oldest hotel (founded in in 1837 by Lord Byron’s former valet); this being where Oscar Wilde, Agatha Christie, and Theodore Roosevelt came to stay, where Winston Churchill and Charles Dickens chose to drink.
Fun fact, it’s also from where Alexander Graham Bell made the first British telephone call.
Working a dank Soho bar, once a month we’d scrounge enough cash to trudge up to Brown’s for a late-night taste of Donovan’s Bar — to inhale the heritage and consume one of the city’s finest martinis.
My kids don’t care for my story nor that of the property — which today stands as a string of 11 interlinked Georgian townhouses boasting 115 rooms and suites spread across an entire block.
No. My kids, thanks to Brown’s, are jaded oligarchs in training.
And the truth? They’ve every right. Because Brown’s is a ruinous drug of devastating competence. Mayfair without the (Russian) vulgarity. The place you stay if you’re in the know.
Here, the spacious suites are designed not to impress but to seduce you into never leaving. And to rep the staff once more — attentive without servility, witty without intrusion, preempting every whim and dismantling inconvenience before you know it exists.
They don’t just remember your name: they remember your favourite seat and what you didn’t order last time. Post Brown’s, everything is poverty cosplay. Chain hotels are prison camps with carpets. Villas mere houses with better views. Even the Ritz, tucked up down the road, feels like an elderly aunt sporting too much perfume and a lingering hint of gin.
So yes, I ruined my kids. They’ll never accept a chain hotel with bolted-down hairdryers and scrambled eggs that taste of regret. But in truth, I ruined myself too. Because once you’ve stayed at Brown’s, every other hotel becomes a pale imitation, a distant echo. But deep down, isn’t that’s the point? roccofortehotels.com
The lowdown
Brown’s London 33 Albemarle St, London W1S 4BP, United Kingdom
Price From $1772 a night.
The Insider
The capital is parked on Brown’s doorstop — the parks (Hyde, Green, St James) mere minutes away, Buckingham Palace, Oxford St, Soho, Bond St, The West End, Piccadilly all an easy amble from here. Best — the hotel’s back door opens directly on to Dover St and some of London’s finest fashion and art (ACNE Studios, James Perse, among others).
When in London
We’d love to say it’s not the case, but you’ll need a brolly — and that’s just in summer. Might we suggest you head for London Undercover to secure a well-crafted, unique or even personalised parapluie.londonundercover.co.uk
