Artist Residence London is ten bedrooms in a townhouse at 52 Cambridge Street, on the residential grid Thomas Cubitt laid out south of Belgravia. The ground floor spent years as a pub, the Clarendon, which closed in 2011, and the cellar beneath it still reads like one. Justin and Charlotte Salisbury opened the house in September 2014 as the third Artist Residence, after Brighton and Cornwall, and the group has since added Oxfordshire and Bristol. The name is literal. Justin's first hotel was his family's Brighton guesthouse, which he could not afford to redecorate, so he advertised for artists to paint it for board. The London house carries original art on its walls, and the MICHELIN Guide gives it one Key.
Seven categories: Small, Small Plus, Medium, Medium Double or Twin, The Loft, Club Suite and Grand Suite. Below the suites they differ by floor and space around the bed rather than by finish. Small rooms sit on the first floor and are as small as the name says. Medium rooms take the second floor, Small Plus and Medium Double or Twin the third. The Loft is in the eaves on the third floor, with a pitched ceiling and a 1930s French-style bath in the open-plan bathroom. The Club Suite is art deco on the second floor, with a roll-top bath and windows over Cambridge Street, and the Grand Suite has a four-poster, a cast-iron bath and floor-to-ceiling sash windows.
The ground floor is the point. The Cambridge Street Kitchen is the all-day room the hotel bills as a neighbourhood restaurant, open to non-residents as well as guests, from half seven on weekdays for breakfast, noon for lunch and six until nine for dinner, with weekend brunch and a bar to midnight on Friday and Saturday. It is British cooking rather than a tasting menu, and the hotel publishes no head chef, so do not book it for a name. Below sits the cocktail cellar in the old pub basement, along with a club room and a private dining room.
The trade-offs are structural. There is no lift and the bedrooms are spread over three floors above the ground floor, so the third-floor rooms and The Loft mean a case up three flights. Breakfast is not usually included, and the hotel says any inclusion is shown at booking. Service is light rather than full, there is no concierge desk, and the ground floor trades to the street as much as to the house. There is no spa, no pool and no gym, and London rates apply anyway. Take it if you want art on the walls, a bar in the old pub cellar and Pimlico outside the door, and skip it if you want to be looked after.
