The Zetter Marylebone is two houses out of a Grade II listed Georgian terrace, numbers 28 and 30 Seymour Street, built around 1780 to 1790 on the Portman Estate and listed in February 1970. Number 30 carried a plaque to Edward Lear, artist and writer, until it came down in 2012 for the reconstruction that turned the pair into a hotel, and it has never gone back up. The Portman Estate brought the site to The Zetter, which opened it on 14 August 2015 as the second of its townhouses. Russell Sage Studio did the interiors around an invented owner, Wicked Uncle Seymour, whose Grand Tour spoils fill the place.
There are 24 rooms in four categories, and the gap between the first two is most of the decision. A Deluxe Double is 19 square metres with a double bed. A Deluxe King is 27 with a king, and cost £46 more on the January midweek night we priced. Above those sit four Junior Suites at 30 square metres, each laid out differently, and Lear's Loft on the roof at 45, with a bath out on the terrace. The public space is one room, the ground-floor Parlour, dressed as a Georgian drawing room in dark colours with a fireplace, gilded mirrors and cabinets of oddments. There is a lift. There is no gym, spa or pool.
Food happens in the Parlour and nowhere else, from half past seven each morning, eight on Sunday, until half past ten at night. Breakfast is à la carte and charged, eggs on sourdough at £7 and a full English at £24, with a help-yourself grab and go at £8. Through the day it runs small plates, a sausage roll, a cheeseburger, British cheese and charcuterie boards, and afternoon tea from £55 a head, noon to four. Drinks are the point. Tony Conigliaro wrote the first cocktail list when the bar opened as Seymour's Parlour with food by Bruno Loubet, and Londoners still book a table here without staying upstairs.
What you are buying is 24 rooms and the people who run them, and that is what guests come back to: names remembered, problems fixed at the desk, a side street that goes quiet two minutes from Oxford Street. What you are not buying is anything else. No restaurant, no spa, no gym, no parking, and breakfast and drinks land on top of a rate that starts at £300 in January only if you sign up free to The Zetter Club, £353 if you do not. The interiors are still the 2015 ones and a few rooms have small windows. It suits anyone who wants a house rather than a hotel, and who would rather eat out in Marylebone than in their own building.
