Mandarin Oriental, Hyde Park - hotel review

The publication this autumn of the Michelin Guide 2014 revealed a second star for Heston Blumenthal’s Dinner at the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park. While this was gratifying for the chef it didn’t mean much to my daughter and two BFFs, arriving for a sleepover to celebrate her ninth birthday.

My daughter, who’d read the entire Harry Potter back catalogue by the age of eight, also has a less bookish penchant for anything to do with nails. She has packets of stick-on fake nails decorated with everything from blue skyscapes with miniature clouds to leopard print. But while I don’t like it, I accept it. As does the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park. In fact, it positively encourages it as the hotel packages up manicures and a film for its privileged young guests.

The rich, red-brick, turreted façade facing Harvey Nichols is mirrored in the red coats of the smart doormen who take your bags as you pull up outside. Unimpressed, Maya and her mates kept a tight hold of their Nintendos.

Originally built as a palatial gentleman’s club in 1889, with lavish rooms for smoking and playing billiards, the building opened as the Hyde Park Hotel in 1902. Partially destroyed by fire, it became the Mandarin Oriental in 1996 when it underwent a £57 million restoration, injecting serious glamour to the existing grandeur.

Mixing traditional British and Oriental, interiors include coloured marble to oversized flower arrangements, ornate mouldings and a couple of Buddhas. And that’s just the lobby. Rooms are filled with luxurious chintz — we counted nine lamps just in the living room of our suite — while oil paintings with ornate gilt frames, inlaid tables and heavy olive drapes with tassels frame the leafy park view.

A representative from Little Bu arrived to paint the girls’ nails with non-toxic varnish that washes off. As they bounced on sofas I feared one of the eye-wateringly expensive lamps would get broken (as one of the girls said, “If you break one at home you could just go to Ikea but these look a bit more expensive”).

The staff-to-guest ratio is high — people greet you and escort you at every turn or bring prompt room service pizzas — as good as any restaurant — with rocket and prosciutto. The girls half-watched a Harry Potter film on a sleek Bang & Olufsen television, guzzled milkshakes (with hot toffee sauce on the side) and threw popcorn around. Job done, I let them giggle around in their pyjamas and went to the other room to watch TV in a bed that deserved an award for its comfort level.

The next morning I washed three tired faces in the loft-style marble bathroom with heavily perfumed Ormonde Jayne products before breakfast in Dinner.

The hotel’s other restaurant, the less-formal brasserie-style Bar Boulud is the only London outpost of Michelin-starred New Yorker Daniel Boulud.

Dinner is modern, minimal and linear in a combination of brown wood, leather and metal. The menu includes dishes such as nettle porridge, with frog’s legs, smoked beetroot, garlic and fen- nel. The breakfast buffet here although not cooked by Blumenthal's team is no less abundant, with fruits, breads, preserves, nuts and juices. The girls ate pancakes with chocolate spread and fresh juices.

The back of the hotel looks onto Hyde Park and the Serpentine — if you stand at the window at 10.30am you can watch the royal horseguards trot by. The hotel’s royal connection spans from the coronation of George VI when guests could use the park entrance, otherwise reserved for purely royal use, to Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret learning to dance there in the Thirties to the gala dinner the night before the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.

But I doubt any of them enjoyed themselves as much as three girls with painted nails.

The Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park, 66 Knightsbridge, SW1, has a one-night Suite Little BU and Master Beau Sleep-Over from £745 B&B, excluding VAT, based on a family of four, including manicure and varnishes, a film with popcorn and milkshakes.