The London Edition

The Edition is the only hotel brand where I've stayed in four cities — London, Miami, LA, Rome — and felt immediately at home in each one. Not because the properties are identical. Because they've figured out what the brand actually means and they execute it consistently. You walk in knowing exactly what you're getting. No surprises. That's harder to build than it looks.

Four Editions, four cities. Every time I walk in, I know exactly what I'm getting. No surprises. That's harder to build than it looks.

In London, the building does the heavy lifting: a Grade II listed Belle Époque pile on Berners Street, built 1905–1911, with carved ceilings and marble proportions that Ian Schrager restored rather than overrode. The Berners Tavern is one of the most beautiful dining rooms in London — a former ballroom hung floor to ceiling with hundreds of gilt-framed paintings. The Punch Room is one of the better bar rooms in the city. Neither feels accidental.

The location is the most useful of any London hotel if you plan to walk anywhere. Soho is eight minutes. Covent Garden is ten. Oxford Circus is four. You don't need a taxi from here. That's the point of the Edition model: good building, good food, good bar, location that makes the city accessible. It works every time.

Berners Street, off Oxford Street, is not an address that announces itself. The building does the work: a Belle Époque hotel facade, Grade II listed, built between 1905 and 1911 for the Berners Estate. The entry hall — carved ceilings, marble, the proportions of a room designed to receive people — communicates its age immediately.

Ian Schrager's decision in 2013 was to restore rather than override. Yabu Pushelberg's design has worked with the building rather than against it. The first impression is of a building that has been given back to itself after spending a long time as something else.

173 rooms across eight floors of a Georgian building in Fitzrovia. The rooms are compact — the building was designed as a hotel in 1905, and the room footprints reflect the era's understanding of what a hotel room needed to be. What they have instead of size is quality: every material is correct, the proportions are used efficiently, nothing is an afterthought.

Request a room on the higher floors facing Berners Street. The building is on a relatively quiet Fitzrovia street, and the upper floors gain both quiet and better proportional sense.

The Berners Tavern is the reason to come even if you are not staying — a former hotel ballroom with its walls hung floor to ceiling with hundreds of gilt-framed paintings. The cooking is serious. The breakfast here is better than anything you'll find in a nearby café, and the room in the morning is the best version of it.

The Punch Room — a wood-paneled bar serving punch-based cocktails — is the most specific and most successful concept at the London Edition. The list is short, the execution is precise, and the room is exactly right. Arrive before 7pm to guarantee a seat.

Fitzrovia is the neighborhood at the center of the map — north of Soho, east of Marylebone, west of Bloomsbury, south of Regent's Park. From the London Edition's Berners Street, you can reach every other part of central London in twenty minutes on foot. Oxford Circus is four minutes.

Charlotte Street (Fitzrovia's main restaurant street) is five minutes east. The hotel's location removes the need for taxis — this is a hotel where walking is the operating principle.