Great British Escape:
Pillow talk
Henry Hopwood-Phillips goes on holiday... to the frontiers of Belgravia
star-rating is more likely to guarantee a price bracket than a living standard in the hotelier business. And even when stars arent a priority, the average traveller still nds himself, or herself, forking out anything up to 120 for a night in the equivalent of a Travelodge. You know the sort. It has the upholstery of a mid-90s Ford Mondeo, a bath that doubles as a foot spa and a TV that makes your iPad titter, all marinating in a general air of shattered dreams and broken brio, which incidentally smells a bit like Wotsits. Its a cold and rainy night. These thoughts swim through my head as I shudder towards the hotel at The Orange. Hit by a wall of warmth, not just in the radiation sense, visually, my soul, forcibly accustomed itself to a style most interior designers would paradoxically describe as inoffensive (mediocrity is always offensive) Cubitt House, the owners of The Orange, seem to be bucking the trend. Instead of an enervated room, Im confronted by the cosiest corner of a farmstead, a manorial barn, a cottage; with
The Egyptian cotton swallows me up, chews on me for a few fragrant minutes, and was going to spit me out into the weekend...
high walls, cathedral ceiling, exposed beams, marble bathroom and steam radiator. Everything screams solidity and home a far cry from wobbly door handles and dodgy shaving sockets. My only criticism is the bath, or rather the plug in the middle of it, a rather Italian ourish of style over substance. I scramble around for a mini-bar. It doesnt have one (The Orange does provide room service). But if a mini-bar is a tax on laziness in a normal hotel, its a supertax when youre sitting on top of a pub. Id imagined that one of the downsides to having only a few feet of plaster between you and the bacchic rites of a Friday night in London would be the noise, but its non-existent. I dive-bomb the bed, as every Friday commuter is wont to do. The Egyptian cotton swallows me up, chews on me for a few fragrant minutes, and was going to spit me out into the weekend before I twigged what was going on. Stopping myself, I grab a coffee. Tea Pigs and a cafetiere are a nice change to Tetleys bags of sadness and crumbs of dehydrated coffee beaten into a pallid clay submission by boiling water and a cartridge of a lukewarm translucent substance that calls itself milk. The caffeine injection fails. Morpheus whisks me away.
If I go to sleep in the cradle of a cottage, when I wake, draw the curtains and pull back the blinds I seem to arise to blue skies above a Parisian square. Its actually Mozarts Square, more a triangle really, and its full of farmers who have come to sell their food at Pimlico Farmers Market. I slink downstairs to the breakfast room. Its all bleached wood and airy, almost neo-colonial, furniture. Theres an East-of Suez meets Paris vibe going on, with a touch of the nautical to boot. Its hard to put your nger on it. But when breakfast comes (I was very boring on an incredibly varied menu), I stop wanting to put my nger on anything other than the cutlery. My English breakfast was so delicious it returned me to the stupefaction from which Id just emerged. 37 Pimlico Road, SW1W 8NE, 020 7881 9844 ([Link])
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