The Connaught - London
- Nick, Editor
- Oct 8
- 4 min read
Updated: Oct 9
An impressive luxury stay in the heart of London's Mayfair
Article summary>>
In this article, you will get our unbiased, independent review and thoughts on The Connaught Hotel in London.
Rooms & suites
Food & Drink
Amenities
Service
Vibe
Location
Thoughts
Booking
London tours & activities
Some grand hotels impress; The Connaught seduces. Tucked on Carlos Place in the heart of Mayfair, it presents a quietly patrician façade, portico, doormen, a flicker of tail-lights disappearing down Mount Street, and then draws you into its world with a kind of low, confident glamour. Inside, the mood is hushed but never stiff: polished wood, hand-painted panelling, a sinuous staircase that seems to have absorbed a century of footsteps, and lighting that flatters everyone who crosses the threshold. The Connaught feels less like a place you check in and more like a club you’ve somehow always belonged to.
Rooms & Suites at The Connaught London
Guest rooms carry that same sense of belonging. Some are classic in tone, silk wall coverings, deep armchairs, handsome writing desks and marble bathrooms with waterfall showers and generous tubs; others, in the contemporary wing, lean lighter and more modern, with clean-lined furniture and a softer, urban palette. All are layered with quiet luxuries: bed linens that whisper rather than rustle, switches that do precisely what you hope, blackout curtains that deliver the bliss of a late London morning. In suites, fireplaces and art lend a townhouse intimacy; window views trade between leafy corners of Mayfair and the carousel of Carlos Place. A tray of tea appears as if by instinct. You settle in quickly.
Food & Drink:
It’s downstairs, though, that the hotel’s personality becomes unmistakable. At the Connaught Bar, a graphite-and-mirror jewel box, cocktails arrive like small works of art, classics reimagined with a precise, painterly hand. The choreography is exquisite without fuss: crystal chilled to the heartbeat, citrus oils misting under lamplight, a martini that seems to reset your posture.
Around the corner, the Coburg Bar tempers the mood with club chairs, portrait-lined walls, and the soft murmur of conversation, ideal for an afternoon glass of Champagne or a nightcap that stretches into a second. In daylight hours, Jean-Georges at The Connaught spills light through its conservatory windows onto plates that feel both cosmopolitan and comfort-laced, spiced truffle pizza, seasonal salads, and delicate crudos, served with an ease that suits a late breakfast as well as a lazy lunch.
For the ceremony, there is Hélène Darroze at The Connaught, a gastronomic salon where French technique flirts with British produce in a sequence of courses that is both refined and deeply personal. The room glows in rose and wood tones, the service is an essay in poise, and the wine list is a study in temptation. When you emerge, Mayfair’s night seems to move at a slightly more elegant pace.
Amenities:
The hotel’s Aman Spa is the city’s secret exhale. Descend from the bustle to a cocoon of slate and water, the pool a long, dark ribbon lit softly from beneath, steam and sauna tucked into warm stone, treatment rooms perfumed with the hush of cedar and citrus. Therapies draw on Asian ritual and British botanicals; you leave with shoulders dropped and a mind tuned to a lower register. A compact fitness studio faces a courtyard calm enough to pretend you’re not in central London.
Service:
Service is where The Connaught distinguishes itself with quiet audacity. It is deeply Maybourne in its polish, anticipatory, graceful, unhurried, yet it speaks fluent London: witty when it should be, discreet when it must be. A scarf appears when the evening cools. A table materialises across town in the hour between shows. Directions are given as stories, with a detour for a gallery you didn’t know you needed. There is ritual (the bow of a doorman, the ceremony of a martini trolley), but there is also warmth; a sense that the team enjoys shaping your day as much as you enjoy living it.
Vibe:
The vibe balances heritage with a soft contemporary pulse. Daytimes bring art advisors and fashion editors drifting through the lobby, couples returning from the Royal Academy with catalogues under their arms, and guests who make a ritual of the hotel’s afternoon tea, tiered trays of patisserie served with a light touch beneath sparkling crystal. Evenings gather pace: the Connaught Bar hums; the Coburg purrs; upstairs, turn-down reveals slippers precisely aligned and a bookmark you didn’t realise you needed. Step outside and there’s the Connaught Patisserie on Mount Street, a pink, jewel-box bakery whose pastries (and that cheeky hound) have a habit of becoming carry-on souvenirs.
Location:
Location is the trump card you don’t need to play. From Carlos Place, Mayfair unfurls in every direction: Mount Street’s boutiques and galleries are a minute away; Hyde Park five minutes’ stroll for morning runs under plane trees; Grosvenor Square is for a leafy interlude; Bond Street, Savile Row, and the jewel-box arcades are within easy reach. The West End’s theatres and St James’s clubs are walkable; taxis appear as if summoned by thought. You are close to everything and insulated from most things, which is a rare alchemy in central London. For more information and bookings, click here
What lingers is the hotel’s proportion: the measure of light to shadow, ceremony to ease, classicism to now. The Connaught edits the grand-hotel experience until only the essential pleasures remain: a bar where time slows, a dining room where appetite feels like culture, a bedroom that restores without trying, and a team that reads the room, your room, better than most. You leave not with a checklist satisfied, but with a mood: polished, a little perfumed, and gently certain that London still has a way of making you feel both important to the city and completely at home within it.
The Connaught Hotel (London) Review 2025
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