Hotel B

Barranco was where Lima's well-off families spent the summer at the turn of the 20th century. They built villas on the cliff above the Pacific and rode the tram out from the centre. One of those houses, put up in 1914 on Jirón Sáenz Peña, became Hotel B in 2013. It was designed in the Belle Époque manner by the French architect Claude Sahut, and its conversion into a 17-room hotel brought one of the district's best surviving villas back into daily use.

History

For much of the 20th century the house followed the fortunes of Barranco itself. The district was fashionable at first, then faded as Lima's money moved towards Miraflores and San Isidro, and many of its villas were divided, let or left empty. Artists, writers and musicians moved into the cheaper rooms, and by the end of the century Barranco had become the city's bohemian quarter. The revival of this house came from that world. The family behind the Lucía de la Puente gallery, which occupies the building next door, restored the mansion and opened it as a hotel, with the gallery's eye applied to every room. Hotel B later joined Relais & Châteaux, the association of independent hotels and restaurants, and became one of the best known small hotels in the capital.

Architecture and design

Sahut worked in Lima in the first decades of the century, and the house shows the French taste that the Peruvian elite favoured in those years: tall windows, plaster mouldings, ironwork and a staircase rising through the centre of the building. The restoration kept the façade, the high ceilings and the proportions of the salons. What sets the interiors apart is the art. Several hundred works hang through the house, contemporary Peruvian painting and photography alongside older pieces, so that a guest walks through something closer to a private collection than a hotel. A roof terrace looks out over the rooftops of Barranco.

Rooms and suites

The 17 rooms are each different, a consequence of fitting them into an old house rather than a plan drawn for a hotel. Ceilings are high, floors are wooden, and the furniture mixes antiques with contemporary pieces. Some rooms have their own terraces, and each carries its own selection of art. The scale is domestic rather than grand.

Dining

The restaurant serves Peruvian cooking with Mediterranean touches, in a city that has become one of the great places to eat in the Americas. Afternoon tea is served in the salons, and the bar draws Barranco's gallery crowd in the evening. Central, the restaurant of Virgilio Martínez and Pía León, moved to Barranco in 2018 and is close by, so the hotel suits travellers who come to Lima mainly to eat.

Location

The hotel sits at the heart of Barranco, steps from the Puente de los Suspiros, the wooden bridge over the Bajada de Baños, the old path down to the beach. MATE, the museum founded by the photographer Mario Testino, is a few streets away on Avenida Pedro de Osma. The Museo Pedro de Osma, with its colonial painting and silver, is on the same avenue. The Malecón along the cliff leads north to Miraflores, and on clear evenings the sun sets over the Pacific straight ahead. Jorge Chávez International Airport, in Callao, is roughly 45 minutes to an hour by car depending on traffic. Among the luxury hotels in Lima, Hotel B offers a neighbourhood rather than a business district: galleries, cafés and bars that fill up after dark, and old houses on every street.