Why you should experience The Rockwell in London, England.
The Rockwell is a composed townhouse hotel where Earl's Court's Victorian fabric, independent spirit, residential scale and contemporary design sensibility converge across two nineteenth-century houses on Cromwell Road.
Set along Cromwell Road near Earl's Court Road and just steps from St. Philip's Church, the hotel occupies two adjoining Victorian townhouses that Squire & Partners combined during a complete redevelopment for Winyard Developments, preserving the buildings' domestic character while creating a 40-room boutique property. The entrance retains its original mosaic floor, whose colors informed the palette of the surrounding interiors, while a wrought-iron staircase, fireplace, walnut flooring and bookshelves carry surviving period character into the contemporary scheme. Squire & Partners extended the dining room between two existing wings with a glazed wall facing the garden, then connected that interior to the landscaped grounds through a glass walkway spanning the lightwell. The result is a hotel where Victorian residential fabric, restored craftsmanship and carefully inserted contemporary architecture give a heavily traveled section of Cromwell Road the intimacy of a private Kensington residence.
What you should know about The Rockwell.
The Rockwell is best known for opening on June 1, 2006 after developer Marldon and Squire & Partners transformed the two townhouses that had formed the one-star Monarch Hotel into an independent four-star property containing 40 individually designed guestrooms. Squire & Partners restored the entrance mosaic and developed the public interiors around its colors, while the project introduced a walnut-floored lounge, integrated bar and breakfast servery, glazed dining-room extension and remodeled south-facing garden lined with timber slats and hardwood decking. The accommodation program spans six principal categories, from 12-square-meter Single Standard rooms and 18-square-meter Standard Doubles to 28-to-30-square-meter Deluxe Doubles, lower-ground Garden Rooms with private patios and two-level Mezzanine Suites conceived with separate living areas. Philippe Starck and Hansgrohe fittings, bespoke oak cabinetry, pocket-sprung mattresses and Victorian windows establish a consistent material style across room categories whose individual dimensions and layouts remain conditioned by the original townhouse structures. The 2006 conversion turned the former Monarch Hotel into a substantially more authored hospitality environment while preserving enough nineteenth-century fabric for the original houses to remain legible beneath the new program.
Andrew Larsen established the property's original culinary character as head chef of One-Eight-One, the 40-seat restaurant that debuted with The Rockwell in June 2006 and served dishes including smoked haddock with creamed spinach and rack of lamb with honey-roasted parsnips. Squire & Partners made One-Eight-One integral to the architecture by extending its dining room toward the garden and designing the adjoining bar as a discreet furniture element capable of doubling as the breakfast servery. The Rockwell now continues that indoor-outdoor relationship through an all-day restaurant and redesigned cherry-wood-and-marble bar, with a glass bridge leading directly into the large south-facing walled garden where oversized planters support mature bamboo and other planting. Together, Andrew Larsen, One-Eight-One, Squire & Partners and the current garden restaurant trace a continuous hospitality idea from the 2006 opening, with food, interior architecture and the unusually substantial garden functioning as interconnected parts of The Rockwell.
How to fold The Rockwell into your trip.
The Rockwell works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing Victorian artistic experimentation, preserved domestic design and twentieth-century museum architecture through Kensington's unusually concentrated design culture.
Begin at Leighton House, where painter Frederic Leighton commissioned architect George Aitchison to create his home and studio beginning in 1865, then expanded it repeatedly over three decades, culminating in the 1877-to-1881 Arab Hall inspired by La Zisa in Palermo and assembled with Damascus tiles, William De Morgan ceramics and a Walter Crane mosaic frieze manufactured in Venice. Continue to 18 Stafford Terrace, home of Punch cartoonist Edward Linley Sambourne from 1875, where Japanese, Middle Eastern and Chinese objects survive within a remarkably complete Aesthetic Movement interior preserved by his descendants before the Victorian Society opened the house publicly in 1980. Conclude at Design Museum, which selected the former Commonwealth Institute as its new home in 2008 before John Pawson developed the interior, OMA prepared the master plan and Allies and Morrison worked on the exterior restoration, allowing the museum to reopen in Kensington in 2016 inside the Grade II listed 1960s structure. The progression moves from Leighton and Aitchison's intensely collaborative artist-house through Sambourne's preserved domestic aesthetic into Pawson and OMA's contemporary museum intervention, placing The Rockwell within a district where successive generations have treated interiors as serious expressions of artistic identity.
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