Jumeirah Carlton Tower

Cadogan Place is a long private garden with tennis courts between Sloane Street and Belgravia, and in 1961 an eighteen-storey hotel rose beside it. The Jumeirah Carlton Tower in London opened that year as the Carlton Tower, a hotel on the American model with a roast-beef restaurant on the ground floor and bedrooms stacked above with views over the gardens.

History

The Hotel Corporation of America developed the Carlton Tower and Michael Rosenauer designed it. The Rib Room opened with the hotel in 1961 and served rib of beef carved at the table for the next fifty-eight years, becoming a Knightsbridge institution with a clientele of politicians, bankers and the families of the surrounding squares. The early decades coincided with the rise of Chelsea and Knightsbridge as a fashion quarter, and the Carlton Tower was for years the address of American visitors who wanted a hotel built to their expectations, with air conditioning and large bathrooms at a time when London's older hotels had neither. Jumeirah, the Dubai hotel group, took the hotel over in 2001, its first property outside the Gulf, together with the Lowndes Hotel around the corner. In 2019 the building closed for a two-year rebuild and reopened in June 2021; the group has since settled on the name Jumeirah Carlton Tower.

Architecture and design

Rosenauer's tower was among the first London hotels in the post-war American idiom: a slab of bedrooms over a low podium of public rooms. The 2021 renovation, with interiors by 1508 London, replaced almost everything behind the façade. Bedrooms were combined to make larger rooms and suites, the public rooms were redrawn around a new entrance sequence, and the Peak, the hotel's health club high in the building, was rebuilt around its pool under a glass roof.

Rooms and suites

The rebuild reduced the count to 186 rooms and suites, 87 of them suites, with larger bathrooms and more connecting rooms for families. Many rooms look over Cadogan Place gardens; higher floors see across to Hyde Park and the roofs of Belgravia. The Royal Suite on the top floor is the largest.

Dining

Al Mare, the ground-floor restaurant, cooks Italian seafood and opened with the renovation. The Chinoiserie, the lounge off the lobby, has served afternoon tea since the hotel's early years and kept its name through the rebuild. A bar completes the ground floor.

Wellness

The Peak Fitness Club and Spa has a 20-metre indoor pool, a gym, studios and treatment rooms. Guests also have the use of Cadogan Place gardens across the road, including its tennis courts, a privilege otherwise reserved for residents of the surrounding houses.

Weddings and events

The ballroom takes weddings and dinners, and a run of smaller rooms serves meetings and private lunches. The gardens opposite give wedding parties a private setting for photographs in the middle of Knightsbridge. The hotel hosts weddings and corporate meetings throughout the year.

Location

Sloane Street, with its designer boutiques, runs along the far side of the gardens. Harvey Nichols is at the top of the street at Knightsbridge, and Harrods on Brompton Road is a short walk beyond it. Cadogan Hall, the concert venue on Sloane Terrace, is at the southern end of the gardens, and the Saatchi Gallery and the King's Road lie beyond Sloane Square. Sloane Square station, on the District and Circle lines, is at the southern end of Sloane Street; Knightsbridge station on the Piccadilly line has direct trains to Heathrow in about forty-five minutes. Victoria station, for the Gatwick Express, is roughly a kilometre and a half to the east. Few luxury hotels in London sit on a residential garden square, and that is the point of this one.