With a million and one new hotels vying for your attention, it’s no longer enough for a property to have personality. Some of the more successful stays have adopted ‘a personality’. In the elevator at Hari Hong Kong, guests are greeted on screen by ‘Hari’, the hotel’s elegant, eccentric ambassador who wears a bowler hat everywhere he goes. At the Somm in Washington state, a statue of ‘Sommsquatch’, the hotel’s sasquatch-sommelier, is the first thing you’ll see as you check in at the cork-clad reception desk. And London’s Mayfair Townhouse, historically a safe meeting place for the LGBTQ+ community, including Oscar Wilde and Alexander McQueen, created the dapper Dandy Fox, a character found on every wrought-iron door knocker and in toy form at the Dandy Bar.
Now there is the Newman, a new design hotel in Fitzrovia shaped by the legacy of Nancy Cunard. Born in 1896, the hotel’s real-life inspiration rejected an inheritance to a vast shipping fortune and instead spent her life involved in the creative arts and political activism. The tabloid newspapers called her ‘the rebel heiress’. A poet wrote of her eccentric style and ‘moonstone white’ skin. But at The Newman, she is just ‘Nancy’.
Some 60 years after her death, Lind + Almond design studio used Nancy’s personal art and wondrous wardrobe to shape the look of the Newman, located just minutes from her Fitzrovia home. Nancy’s geometric-print ivory bangles, brought from Africa and worn up her arms, inform the shape of the carved wooden bedheads. Her infamous beaded hat designs are replicated in the lobby carpet and parquet floor pattern. When you wash your hands, look at the curved marble sinks and you’ll see that W1’s Art Deco wavy balconies are behind their silhouette.
There seems to be no expense spared, with skirting boards carved from purple-tinged marble and leather Pilates rings in the Swedish-flavoured wellness area. Some rooms have private terraces with their own saunas and ice baths.
We think Nancy would have approved. Fitzrovia in the 1920s was known for its artistic scene and Nancy was the neighbourhood’s It girl, socialite and muse to Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Ezra Pound and Man Ray. You’ll see patrons doing their best Nancy impression at the hotel’s subterranean Gambit Bar, a creative hub with live jazz, chess sessions and acoustic nights throughout the week.
Brasserie Angelica, the bright, buzzy restaurant, is named after Virginia Woolf’s niece, an artist and member of the bohemian Bloomsbury Set. Like the Cunard line, the menu is well travelled, prioritising Northern European fish and Swedish seafood salads — and a Danish aeblekage plum tart to share alongside a cardamom bun for dessert.
Nancy’s spirit is here too, in the shimmering lighting, sensuous curved motifs and the wooden cart accessorised with open-faced Swedish sandwiches. Together the package gives a whole new meaning to ‘storied hotels’, linking patrons to a pretty corner of London and its illustrious history.
