Why you should experience Bankside Hotel, Autograph Collection in London, England.
Bankside Hotel, Autograph Collection is an artful boutique hotel where Bankside's studio culture, contemporary collecting, cinematic design and creative experimentation converge within a polished interpretation of the neighborhood's artistic character.
Set along Blackfriars Road near Stamford Street and just steps from the River Thames, the hotel occupies the lower six floors of a building by architect Ian Simpson, placing contemporary hospitality within the architectural resurgence that has reshaped the southern approach to Blackfriars Bridge. Los Angeles designers Dayna Lee and Ted Berner of Powerstrip Studio conceived the interiors as a polished live-in art school, drawing upon careers in film art direction, set decoration and production design that included work on Dances With Wolves and Thelma & Louise. Lee commissioned British makers including ceramicist and illustrator Laura Carlin, whose demonstrated-tile murals translate episodes from the South Bank's cultural history into the interior, and artist-designer Malgorzata Bany, who created sculptural tables for the property. The result is a hotel where Ian Simpson, Dayna Lee, Ted Berner, Laura Carlin and Malgorzata Bany give Bankside a hospitality address shaped by the same discussion between architecture, making and contemporary art that animates the surrounding district.
What you should know about Bankside Hotel.
Bankside Hotel, Autograph Collection is best known for opening in October 2018 as a 161-room independent hotel within Marriott International's Autograph Collection, pairing Powerstrip Studio's interiors with an art program developed around Contemporary Collective and a dedicated Maker in Residence initiative that places working artists inside the hotel. Contemporary Collective selects emerging practitioners for residencies in the on-site Makers Space, while the hotel's White Box presents changing exhibitions curated with Contemporary Collective and DegreeArt alongside the residency program. The permanent creative style incorporates commissioned British work and a midcentury collection assembled by Powerstrip Studio, whose principals Dayna Lee and Ted Berner translated their motion-picture backgrounds into custom furnishings, demonstrated textiles and sculptural interventions conceived specifically for the building. The program remains active in 2026 through Material Worlds: Craft, Texture and Design, a White Box exhibition running from July through October and bringing together five contemporary artists, including three former Bankside Hotel Artists in Residence.
Chef Lee Streeton established the hotel's original culinary authorship through Art Yard Bar & Kitchen after serving as head chef at 45 Jermyn St., arriving with a menu that included chargrilled cuttlefish with black rice and chorizo, baked bone marrow with curry sauce and a cataplana of monkfish, shellfish, saffron and potato. Dayna Lee carried the broader artistic language directly into Art Yard, where an 80-cover restaurant and 20-cover dining room incorporated commissioned work from British makers and another Laura Carlin mural. Contemporary Collective deepens the property's creative character by connecting its exhibitions with working artists, while DegreeArt extends that curatorial relationship into White Box and the hotel's current exhibition cycle. Together, Lee Streeton, Dayna Lee, Laura Carlin, Contemporary Collective and DegreeArt turn Bankside Hotel, Autograph Collection into a hospitality project whose restaurant, residency program, commissioned objects and exhibition spaces operate as interconnected expressions of contemporary creative practice.
How to fold Bankside Hotel into your trip.
Bankside Hotel, Autograph Collection works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing modern art, reconstructed Elizabethan theater and centuries of London food culture along the south bank of the Thames.
Begin at Tate Modern, where Herzog & de Meuron transformed Sir Giles Gilbert Scott's former Bankside Power Station into a museum that opened on May 11, 2000, welcomed 5.25 million people during its first year and later expanded through another major Herzog & de Meuron intervention. Continue to Shakespeare's Globe, where Sam Wanamaker's campaign to reconstruct the 1599 playhouse produced a 1,570-capacity open-air theater opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997, four years after Wanamaker's death and more than a quarter-century after he founded the Shakespeare Globe Trust. Conclude at Borough Market, whose history reaches a millennium before local parishioners relocated the market to its present site in 1756, where the arrival of a railway viaduct in 1862 strengthened its wholesale produce trade before the 1998 Food Lovers' Fair accelerated its reinvention around specialist food. The progression moves from Herzog & de Meuron's museum architecture through Wanamaker's theatrical reconstruction into a market shaped by medieval commerce, Victorian railways and modern food culture, revealing the dense creative history surrounding Bankside Hotel, Autograph Collection.
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