Rosewood London

Why you should experience Rosewood London in London, England.

Rosewood London is an urbane heritage hotel where Holborn's commercial history, Edwardian architectural ambition, artistic culture and contemporary hospitality converge within the former headquarters of the Pearl Assurance Company.

Set along High Holborn near Southampton Row and just steps from Lincoln's Inn Fields, the hotel occupies a vast Edwardian Baroque complex begun in 1912 at the center of Holborn's longstanding commercial quarter. Historic England attributes the central block of 1912 to 1919 to architect C. Newman, with a Portland-stone exterior, Ionic columns, bronze entrance gates, leaded domes and an interior marble staircase establishing the building's grand physical character. Pearl Assurance occupied the complex as its headquarters for much of the twentieth century, with P. Moncton adding the east block in 1929 to 1930 and Bates & Sinning extending the composition during the 1950s. The building became a hotel in 2000 before an £85 million reinvention brought Tony Chi and Associates to High Holborn and introduced Rosewood Hotels & Resorts to Europe in October 2013. The result is a hotel where Pearl Assurance, C. Newman, P. Moncton and Tony Chi connect Holborn's commercial past with more than a century of architectural evolution.

What you should know about Rosewood London.

Rosewood London is best known for its £85 million transformation of the former Pearl Assurance headquarters, with Tony Chi and Associates creating the guestrooms, public rooms and event spaces around the surviving Edwardian architecture while the Grade II-listed frontage, dome and seven-storey Pavonazzo marble staircase were restored. The staircase incorporates seven varieties of marble beneath a 166-foot cupola and has been valued at £40 million. The building itself developed in four principal construction phases across almost half a century before Pearl Assurance departed in 1989. Rosewood debuted with 262 guestrooms and 44 suites, including Manor House, conceived as an independent residential wing and subsequently recognized at the European Hospitality Awards. The property accumulated eight major accolades within its early years of operation. Contemporary recognition includes Two MICHELIN Keys in 2024, a Forbes Travel Guide Five-Star rating in 2025 and sixth place among London hotels in the 2025 Travel + Leisure World's Best Awards. Tony Chi's interiors, the £85 million investment, the 166-foot cupola, seven-marble staircase, European brand debut and continuing international recognition established Rosewood London as one of the most ambitious conversions of an Edwardian commercial building into a twenty-first-century London hotel.

Martin Brudnizki developed another major strand of the property's authorship through Scarfes Bar and Holborn Dining Room. British caricaturist Gerald Scarfe supplied the drawings and paintings that gave his namesake bar its visual character amid antique books, fireplaces and live jazz. Scarfes Bar reached No. 43 in The World's 50 Best Bars in 2023, No. 37 in 2024 and No. 31 in 2025, turning the collaboration between Brudnizki and Scarfe into one of Rosewood London's most internationally recognized cultural signatures. Chef Calum Franklin created The Pie Room at Holborn Dining Room in 2018 after developing an increasingly ambitious pastry program, producing more than 200 pies daily at launch before publishing The Pie Room cookbook in 2020 with 80 recipes and earning Hotel Chef of the Year at the 2019 Catey Awards. South African chef Nokx Majozi subsequently led The Pie Room from 2022 to 2025 after working with Franklin on its development, mentoring chef Laszlo Kiss before his continuation of the pastry tradition. Martin Brudnizki, Gerald Scarfe, Calum Franklin, Nokx Majozi and Laszlo Kiss extend Tony Chi's architectural authorship into art, cocktails and British culinary craft, giving Rosewood London a creative character driven by named practitioners.

How to fold Rosewood London into your trip.

Rosewood London works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing legal history, architectural collecting and the development of British cultural institutions through Holborn.

Begin at Sir John Soane's Museum, where architect Sir John Soane transformed three adjoining houses at Nos. 12, 13 and 14 Lincoln's Inn Fields into an intensely personal architectural laboratory filled with antiquities, paintings and models, before an 1833 Act of Parliament secured the collection for the nation after his death. Soane arranged works including Canaletto paintings, William Hogarth's A Rake's Progress and the alabaster sarcophagus of Seti I within interiors conceived as demonstrations of architecture, light and spatial invention. Continue to Hunterian Museum, where the Royal College of Surgeons preserves the collection developed from eighteenth-century surgeon and anatomist John Hunter, whose thousands of anatomical and pathological preparations became the foundation for one of Britain's most important histories of medical investigation. Parliament purchased Hunter's collection in 1799 before entrusting it to the Company of Surgeons, beginning an institutional lineage that eventually produced a museum named for him within the Royal College of Surgeons. Conclude at British Museum, founded by Parliament in 1753 around the collection of physician and naturalist Sir Hans Sloane and opened to the public at Montagu House in 1759 before Robert Smirke's nineteenth-century Greek Revival complex reshaped the institution on Great Russell Street. Sydney Smirke subsequently created the Round Reading Room within the Great Court, where generations of researchers including Karl Marx worked beneath its vast dome as the museum developed into an international center of scholarship. The progression moves from Soane's architectural imagination through Hunter's anatomical collecting into Sloane and the Smirkes' encyclopedic institution, revealing the intellectual culture surrounding Rosewood London beyond High Holborn.

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