G is for Grand hotels are back in vogue

Jade Jagger is the kind of girl who can hold her birthday party anywhere she wants. Woody's, the Met or the Light Bar would all have doubtless hosted a knees-up for one of London's most sought-after women. Instead she chose Claridge's.

Hip hotels, you see, are over. London gives grand hotel like no other city and in the past few years they have been given a sparkling makeover. The Ritz - and its new Rivoli Bar - is flourishing again thanks to the investment of the reclusive Barclay Brothers and under the aegis of 'Sir' Giles Sheppard, the gentleman hotelier par excellence.

Claridge's now has a David Collins cocktail bar, a Gordon Ramsay restaurant, a dazzling Deco lobby and a spa that makes Vogue's Kathy Phillips swoon.

Over at the Berkeley in Knightsbridge, another David Collins design, the Blue Bar, is packing them in in a way that reminds me of the Met Bar in the late Nineties. Even that most English of hotels, The Connaught, has been given a nip and tuck by society decoratrix Nina Campbell.

Where once grand hotels were dull and forbidding, they are now glamorous and intriguing. These days, manufactured modernity is commonplace. Whether it's the makeover madness that has affected Burberry, Dunhill and Daks, the automated novelty of Yo! Sushi, or the relentless grooviness of a Schrager hotel, cookie-cutter cool is ubiquitous. We are all too familiar with it and, of course, familiarity breeds contempt.

We spend our working lives strolling around interiors which strive for a bland minimalist uniformity enlivened with the occasional correctly 'witty' piece of Starck or Koons. What a change it is to walk into a place like The Connaught, where staff in tailcoats, top hats and ties swirl around you like extras from a Thirties musical, and where instead of the fumbling familiarity of a waiter who looks and dresses like your drug dealer, the quiet dignity of impeccable service prevails.

Claridge's (020 7629 8860).

The Connaught (020 7499 7070). The Berkeley (020 7235 6000)

More grand glamour

A-Z travel guide for 2002