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hat’s going on in Mayfair? It’s not as though the most expensive square on the Monopoly board needs a huge cash injection, but that’s exactly what’s happening. Stroll past the designer shops and supercar dealerships and you’ll notice one thing — construction. There’s Grosvenor Square, where the former US embassy is being turned into a Rosewood hotel. There’s Hanover, a new area of shops, offices and a soon-to-open Mandarin Oriental. There are new restaurants and new bars, and even the Ritz is at it, digging down five storeys to get bigger, brighter and ritzier.
And then, sprouting from this overpriced building site is the plant-smothered 1 Hotel, claiming to be “London’s very first mission-driven sustainable luxury hotel”. Sustainability? In Mayfair? Really?
“We couldn’t ask for a better location,” Raul Leal, the president of SH Hotels, owner of the 1 Hotel brand, tells me in the newest outpost’s bar on the day it opens. I’m the first journalist to stay, but the place is full of bright young things lounging on linen-covered banquettes, laptops and drinks vying for space on wooden tables. It’s not very . . . Mayfair. It’s a jeans-and-trainers sort of place — somewhere to hang out with your dog. It’s more Hoxton than Mayfair, but maybe that’s the whole point.
