Café Royal, London

David Chipperfield

Products

34 1004
Window handle

FSB 1004 by David Chip­per­field bears the hall­mark of the Mod­ernist pi­o­neers. It is un­der­pinned by a clean-lined formal concept that meets all func­tional re­quire­ments giving ex­pres­sion to his formal idea in both public and private spheres.

34 1004
Window handle

Historical luxury shakes hands with modern sobriety

Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Vir­ginia Woolf, Cary Grant, Eliz­a­beth Taylor, Winston Churchill, Muham­mad Ali… that’s some­thing of a who’s who from the worlds of pol­i­tics, art and lit­er­a­ture. And yet these are just a few of the celebri­ties who have stayed or whiled away the hours at London’s Café Royal since it opened in 1865; indeed, Oscar Wilde vir­tu­ally lived there. Fol­low­ing four years of ren­o­va­tion work the Café Royal is now ac­com­mo­dat­ing guests again. The team of ar­chi­tects around David Chip­per­field has managed to strike a styl­is­tic balance between 21st-cen­tury moder­nity and the mag­nif­i­cent am­bi­ence of his­toric spaces from the 1860s and 1920s.

Though the Café Royal cer­tainly exudes plenty of grandeur, its 159 rooms, in­clud­ing six “his­toric” suites, are also marked by tran­quil­lity and clean-lined styling. The build­ing, a fusion of vintage British charm and up-to-the-minute fit­ments, is located on Regent Street in the heart of London, within view of Pic­cadilly Circus. Its lobby, halls and suites would seem to suggest some lavish palace rather than an es­tab­lish­ment in the middle of a major city. The famous “Grill Room” has been bril­liantly re­stored in the Louis Seize style. The “stan­dard” hotel rooms, by con­trast, are wholly in the spirit of urbane so­bri­ety with clas­si­cal detail in stone.

Chip­per­field instils the rooms’ in­te­ri­ors with the min­i­mal­ist chic of the streets of London by trans­fer­ring the purist geom­e­try of the pattern of facades on Regent Street onto their walls. The bath­rooms are laid out in lux­u­ri­ous Carrara marble, whilst the premises also boast classy oak parquet floor­ing and doors in satin-nap brass. FSB was able - in the most literal sense - to make a valu­able con­tri­bu­tion to the Café Royal with its 1004 lever handle model, fit­tingly de­signed by David Chipper¬field. The clean-lined formal vo­cab­u­lary of this clas­si­cally modern handle ably blends in with the mix of his­tor­i­cal luxury and modern so­bri­ety in­form­ing its ar­chi­tec­tural sur­round­ings.

Building details

Location

Café Royal

68 Regent Street
Soho, London
United Kingdom

Di­rec­tions