Rumours have long swirled about what lies beneath the great 1960s fortress of the former US embassy on Grosvenor Square. There have been lurid fables of cold war bunkers, secret service shooting ranges, CIA interrogation chambers and even escape tunnels to Hyde Park. But none of these fictional fantasies quite compare to the underground lair that has now been excavated below the imposing block, in its new incarnation as one of the fanciest hotels in London.
Owned by the royal family of Qatar, and operated by an offshore company registered in the British Virgin Islands, belonging to one of Hong Kong’s wealthiest dynasties, this former outpost of US imperialism has become a gilded temple to the new global order. Reborn as the Chancery Rosewood, it is a beacon of luxury designed to attract the cream of the world’s ultra-high net worth individuals, so it is only fitting that it should boast the mega-basement to end all mega-basements.
Descending a grand ceremonial staircase, you find yourself in a colossal marble-lined antechamber, a four-storey volume dripping with chandeliers and veneers, reflected in a mirror-polished black ceiling. It feels like the entrance to Kim Il Sung’s mausoleum, but it is the prelude to a gigantic ballroom (serviced by its own car elevator) which sits atop a subterranean spa complex, with swimming pool, saunas and therapy rooms, dug 20 metres below the ground. Long off-limits to the public, access to the building is now limited only by the size of your chequebook. The entry-level “junior suites” start at £1,400 per night.
For the architects, however, the ambition was to open up a building that had long been sealed off. “We really wanted to make it feel as public as possible,” says Julia Loughnane, director at David Chipperfield Architects, the firm responsible for this somewhat sisyphean task. “It was about stripping away all the barriers and restoring a sense of openness.”
When the Finnish-American architect Eero Saarninen designed the building in the 1950s, as the first purpose-built embassy in London, it was intended as an image of open, easy-going America. It featured a public library next to the visa office on its raised ground floor, flooded with a sense of airy transparency and framed by a striking “diagrid” ceiling of intersecting concrete beams. But the blocky form and chequerboard facade, with windows surrounded by big picture frames of Portland stone, wasn’t to everyone’s taste. Critic Reyner Banham called it “monumental in bulk, frilly in detail,” while others compared it to a cigarette factory.
Public ire against the hulk only increased in the following years, when it became the focus of Vietnam war protests and other demonstrations against American might, which in turn prompted the construction of ever more defensive barriers and security pavilions. By the 2000s, the perceived terror threat was so great, and Mayfair neighbours so irate, that the mission fled across the river to Nine Elms, retreating inside a plastic-clad castle on a hill, surrounded by a moat.
In many ways, Saarinen’s building is therefore more open and accessible than it has ever been in living memory. Not that much of the structure is actually still there. In order to accommodate the services required by the hotel, practically everything behind the facade has been demolished and rebuilt. The original U-shaped block has been given a fourth side in order to fit 144 suites, with an atrium in the middle. It has grown vertically too, not that you might realise at first.
“Typically,” says David Chipperfield, “the conservation lobby wants to see a very clear distinction between what was there and what has been added. But we’ve developed a different strategy on a number of projects, from the Neues Museum [in Berlin] onwards, where the difference isn’t so obvious.”
In the case of Grosvenor Square, his team has “stretched” Saarinen’s facade, adding a much taller sixth storey, in the same manner as the original, with an additional two storeys set back as a golden rooftop pavilion, housing a bar and two humungous penthouse suites. The move is deft and precisely executed, and justified on heritage grounds thanks to one of Saarinen’s own sketches. He came up with his competition-winning design while on his three-week honeymoon in London, where he covered the walls and mirrors of his hotel room with sketches – one of which, to the Qataris’ joy, depicted a much bigger version of the building.
“It was a very helpful discovery,” says Chipperfield. “I suspect Saarinen wanted a taller building, but there wasn’t the need for it, once he had laid out the functions across the full width of the square.” He’s right: the inflated version actually feels better suited to its context than the original. The removal of the defensive sloping stone bank, or glacis, that used to ring the building is a welcome change too, making the ground floor open to the pavement for the first time.
The Qataris have also been lucky in that the Finn had a penchant for bling. Visit the building today and you will find the ends of the beams, which project through the facade, clad in gold-anodised aluminium, along with further gilded adornments around the windows, and a frilly gold crown along the roof. They look like the tacky trappings of a luxury hotel (or something a modernist Trump might add to his Oval Office), but these are in fact original. They were intended, Saarinen said, to “add sparkle to the facade”. (Not so the new gilded entrance canopies, which bear the gaudy hand of the Rosewood takeover.)
Saarinen’s gold cruciform columns extend into the lobby too, although that’s pretty much all that’s left of his interior. Chipperfield’s team have done their best to restore and extended the diagrid ceiling, as well as preserve the light fittings and various bits of balustrade, but any sense of the original scheme has been entirely drowned out by Rosewood’s interior designers, who have cranked up the sparkle setting to the max.
Masterminded by French designer Joseph Dirand, it is a fever dream of opulence, every surface writhing with exotic stones, woods and fabrics, a plush palette that looks plucked from an oligarch’s luxury yacht. There have been some attempts to riff off the original building. The new atrium, for example, is lined with giant square O-rings like the facade, but covered in dark wood. “We inspected 1.4m square metres of walnut,” a Rosewood spokesperson tells me, “in order to use 600 sq m, because we wanted it without the knots.”
Such lengths of profligate perfectionism extend to every detail. The bathrooms in the junior suites are entirely smothered in green Indian marble (“We used up the world’s last remaining marble of that type,” they tell me proudly), which they say took one mason in Carrara, Italy, six years to cut. Another marble apparently comes from the same quarry as the Pantheon. “We have 100 types of stone from all across the world,” the rep continues, “and we are slated to be the first five-star hotel to be rated Breeam Outstanding for sustainability”. That will be some feat, if the embodied carbon footprint of crushing an existing concrete building and shipping countless tonnes of stone across the globe are factored in to the assessment.
The suites swell in size as we rise through the hotel, progressively expanding to include offices, private kitchens, steam rooms and two-person bathtubs. The rooms are also configured with little lobbies, so they can be rented together for extended family and staff. One future guest recently visited with his entourage, with the intention of “taking a couple of floors,” with enough space for his doctor, chiropractor, chef and security detail. Ironically, guests here are likely to come with bigger retinues than even the ambassador would have had.
The maximalism reaches an absurdist conclusion on the roof, home to a pair of 350 sq m penthouses, named Elizabeth and Charles, with rates topping £20,000 a night. “We’ve included subtle touches that reflect the royals’ interests,” the stylist tells me, as she curates a cluster of ornaments. “We have artwork relating to the queen’s brooches and love of dogs, while Charles House had nods to polo and Highgrove.” Sadly missing is a framed 2009 letter from Charles to the Qataris, expressing his fury over their choice of architect for their previous London mega-project, at Chelsea Barracks. If only he had similarly intervened here to insist they retained Chipperfield for the interiors.
That said, it is hard to imagine Sir David coming up with something as magnificently gaudy as the Eagle Bar on the roof. Conceived as an end-of-days art deco-ish fantasy, with a swooping multicurved ceiling, the bar looks out at the back of the gilded American eagle sculpture that has always crowned the embassy. For the first time, standing out on the terrace, you can see up close how this patriotic symbol of America’s strength and freedom is in fact made from trash – pieced together from leftover bits of B-52 bombers, forming a sinewy pile of scrap metal, daubed with gold paint.
