We are delighted to have not one but two of our London hotels featured in Sunday Times Travel as ‘Best Places to Stay 2021’.
Both based in Shoreditch these are unique hotels. The Hart, for the Curio collection of the Hilton brand, blends sensitively within new and existing buildings within the Conservation Area, while the Montcalm East, delivered as executive architects in collaboration with Squire and Partners, is an explicit architectural statement in the frenetic tech hub at Old Streets eponymous ‘Silicon Roundabout’.
Hart Hotel is a recently completed 125 bed boutique hotel on a historically challenging site. This sensitive design utilises in part, the original facade of two late Victorian warehouses. The majority of the site had been empty of habitable buildings since bomb damage in WW2 with several previous development plans by other developers rejected. The hotel site contained within its curtilage the Grade II Listed Griffin Public House and two derelict warehouse buildings fronting Great Eastern Street.
Montcalm East hotel in Shoreditch is a 288 room hotel and was delivered by the 5plus team to a design concept by Squire and Partners Architects. The facade concept is expressed as a glazed skin enlivened with differing patterns of transparency, opacity and solidity to convey a series of diagonals breaking across an underlying vertical structure, this being the first unitised façade in the UK without a horizontal joint. The conjunction of the vertical and the diagonal create a visual effect of depth and movement, and as a result of this dynamic concept the building has become something of a local landmark.
Here is what The Sunday Times Travel said:
“A Hilton in East London sounds try-hard, but Hart a recent launch in the Curio Collection is a more boutique offering. Guests enter via glass doors, bypassing a black ribbon sculpture – a nod to Spitalfields’ cloth-weaving history. Hart takes it name from a family carpentry business that used to be on the site and woodwork tools play homage to that. The 26 rooms are glam, with rose gold lighting, scallop-edged chairs and swish bathrooms. The Eastern Med-inspired restaurant, Barbourn, serves soft-shell crab and mains from the wood-fired mangal grill.
In June the 288-room Moncalm East – previously M by Moncalm – reopened after a complete interior refurbishment. The standard rooms, a spacious 270sqft have mood changing lights, underfloor heating and artwork that riffs off Shoreditch’s murals. The Sky High rooms, 35 of them on the 16th and 17th floors, have full height diagonal windows so you can ogle the city or Battersea Power Station. Eco nods include fountains on every floor. The spa has a decent-sized pool and a Finnish sauna. Tom Riehe runs the slick restaurant, set over two floors. Fresh-out-of-the-oven margheritas and steaming coconut dals are great value.”
