A day at Claridge's: timeless old-world glamour at one of the world's most iconic hotels

The most interesting thing about Claridge's isn't visible from the Foyer at all. It's in a number the hotel is quite proud of: roughly seventy percent of guests are repeat visitors, a striking figure for a hotel of this size. The staff turn out to be just as loyal. Ask at the front desk and it's not unusual to meet someone who has worked at the hotel for twenty, thirty years, on first-name terms with guests who have been returning just as long. That warmth isn't reserved for regulars, either. Everyone we crossed paths with, from the concierge desk down to the person minding the bathrooms, had the same unhurried, genuinely pleased-to-see-you manner, closer to running into an old friend than checking into a hotel. That kind of continuity can't really be manufactured. It's arguably the real reason people keep coming back, more than the marble or the art or the history.

A restoration seven years in the making

Underneath all that continuity is a genuinely wild piece of engineering. Between 2015 and 2022, Claridge's dug five storeys down beneath the existing building to create an entirely new lower level: a spa, a 25-metre pool, a fitness centre, a hair salon and a run of event spaces, all without touching a line of the Art Deco architecture above. Every guest room has also been redone as part of the same project, and the hotel has since added its own bakery, florist and reworked café. Walking through, none of it feels like reinvention for its own sake. It feels like a hotel quietly making sure it stays worth the trip.

Rooms, suites, and a penthouse worth knowing about

Room categories run from smart, compact doubles up through a collection of named suites designed by figures including David Linley, Guy Oliver, Diane von Furstenberg, Bryan O'Sullivan and Michelle Wu, each bringing a slightly different mood to the hotel's underlying Art Deco language. Connecting rooms are available throughout, which makes Claridge's a genuinely practical option for families and not just an occasion hotel.

At the top of the building sits the rooftop penthouse: an ornamental lake, a landscaped garden, its own pool, glass pavilions, and works by Damien Hirst dotted throughout. It's less a hotel room than a private estate suspended above Mayfair. Every bathroom in the hotel, penthouse included, is finished in the same marble, with Claridge's own toiletries and a Toto toilet in every room, the kind of small detail that tells you more about the hotel's standards than any of the grander flourishes.

Dante, and the rest of the map

Food and drink has had its own moment lately. The headline is Dante, the New York institution founded in Greenwich Village in 1915, which arrived first as a pop-up, proved too popular to shut down, and has now taken up permanent residence in the hotel's main restaurant space, complete with its signature Martini hour and live music. The room itself is properly grand, with ornate, coloured-glass ceilings that match the ambition of the food.

For something quieter, The Painter's Room is one of the best reasons to have a drink in this part of Mayfair: an Art Deco cocktail bar in pale pink onyx, with a peach-and-cream glass skylight and a mural by British artist Annie Morris, available for private hire as well as evening drinks. Between Dante, The Painter's Room, the long-running Fumoir and Claridge's Bar itself, there's now a proper drinking map here well beyond the famous afternoon tea.

There's also a newer, more relaxed side to the hotel, tucked behind its own entrance on Brook's Mews: the ArtSpace Café, designed by John Pawson. It trades the Foyer's grandeur for something pared-back and simple, with breakfast and salads running through to mid-afternoon, alongside toasties, crêpes, sandwiches, pastries and good coffee.

Come winter, there's also the Christmas tree: an annual tradition since 2009, where a different designer or artist reinterprets the lobby tree each year, past names including Karl Lagerfeld, Dolce & Gabbana, Diane von Furstenberg and, most recently, Burberry's Daniel Lee. The unveiling has become its own small event in the London calendar, and it sums up the hotel rather well: something genuinely new, staged inside something that never really changes.

The spa

We ended our visit with a couple of hours downstairs, which turned out to be the perfect way to close things out. Three floors beneath the bustle of Mayfair, Claridge's Spa opened in 2022, and it makes no attempt to echo the Art Deco glamour upstairs. The mood down here is entirely different: clean lines, careful lighting, something closer to a Japanese onsen than a Mayfair hotel basement. The treatment itself, a two-hour combination of a massage and a facial, left me properly calm and grounded rather than just relaxed. The therapist checked in throughout, more than once, in a subtle ways, making sure I was fully comfortable, the kind of attentiveness that's rarer in London spas than it should be. There's a heated pool with cabanas to unwind in beforehand, along with a steam room and sauna, all finished in the same understated palette as the treatment rooms.

For a hotel with this much history, it would have been easy for the new additions to feel bolted on. They don't. The spa, the Dante partnership, the penthouse, they all feel like Claridge's simply doing what it's always done: staying exactly as good as everyone assumes it already is.

Written by Marta Diaz · CEO & Editor-in-Chief

Avid tennis player, photographer and traveller. She curates every hotel in the collection and writes The Edit.