Why you should experience St. Martins Lane London, a Morgans Originals Hotel in London, England.
St. Martins Lane London, a Morgans Originals Hotel is a surrealist design hotel where Covent Garden's theatrical culture, late-night creativity, contemporary design and West End performance converge within Philippe Starck and Ian Schrager's fascinating vision of the urban resort.
Set along St. Martin's Lane near Long Acre and just steps from London Coliseum, the hotel occupies a renovated 1960s building that previously housed the Mickey Mouse Club and Lumiere Cinema before becoming Ian Schrager's first hotel project outside the United States. Philippe Starck transformed the building through deliberate manipulations of scale, light and visual wit, introducing golden tooth-shaped stools, oversized chess pieces, yellow-glass revolving doors and guestrooms whose interactive colored lighting turns the façade into a constantly changing nighttime composition. Mackay + Partners served as executive architect on the £23 million project, translating Schrager and Starck's concept into a 204-room London hotel whose architecture made illumination fundamental to the building's identity. The result is a hotel where Ian Schrager, Philippe Starck, Mackay + Partners and the former Lumiere Cinema give Covent Garden's performance culture an architectural counterpart built around theatricality, light and visual invention.
What you should know about St. Martins Lane London.
St. Martins Lane London, a Morgans Originals Hotel is best known for opening in 1999 with 204 guestrooms and suites as the first English collaboration between Ian Schrager and Philippe Starck, establishing a London extension of the boutique-hotel movement the pair had developed in the United States. The original property included seven private garden rooms, a loft-style penthouse and apartment, Asia de Cuba, the Rum Bar and Light Bar, while Jeffrey Chodorow's China Grill Management brought Asia de Cuba to London after launching the concept in New York in 1997. Schrager and Chodorow formalized their relationship in December 1999 through the 50/50 Schrager/Chodorow Restaurant Company, which incorporated St. Martins Lane venues Asia de Cuba, Saint M and Seabar alongside restaurants at Morgans, Delano and Mondrian. Amy Sacco added another chapter in 2007 when she opened the London branch of her New York club Bungalow 8 inside St. Martins Lane, commissioning India Mahdavi to design the members-only venue as Morgans Hotel Group handled its operations. The property underwent a major redesign for its fifteenth anniversary in 2015 under Tim Andreas of Banjo, who reworked the public spaces and created Blind Spot as an homage to Starck while Cuban-born executive chef Luis Pous relaunched Asia de Cuba.
Tim Andreas preserved the visual irreverence of Philippe Starck's original concept through an interior style combining baroque forms, minimalist surfaces and deliberately exaggerated objects, a design lineage the MICHELIN Guide continues to identify as fundamental to the hotel. Luis Pous simultaneously reinterpreted Jeffrey Chodorow's original Asia de Cuba concept through his Cuban upbringing and culinary training, building upon a restaurant inspired by the historical intersection of Chinese migration and Cuban food culture before the London restaurant eventually gave way to the hotel's newer dining program. Andrew Loudon now supplies another named creative presence through Blind Spot's tea-centered cocktail program, while Morgans Originals carries the property forward within Ennismore alongside its London sibling Sanderson. Together, Ian Schrager, Philippe Starck, Jeffrey Chodorow, Amy Sacco, India Mahdavi, Tim Andreas, Luis Pous and Andrew Loudon give St. Martins Lane London, a Morgans Originals Hotel an unusually dense creative genealogy spanning hotel design, restaurant culture and nightlife across more than a quarter-century.
How to fold St. Martins Lane London into your trip.
St. Martins Lane London, a Morgans Originals Hotel works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing theatrical architecture, Renaissance collecting and British portraiture through Covent Garden.
Begin at London Coliseum, where theater impresario Oswald Stoll commissioned architect Frank Matcham to create an exceptionally ambitious variety theater that opened in 1904, later becoming the home of English National Opera in 1968 and preserving Matcham's exuberant Edwardian auditorium immediately beside the hotel. Continue to National Gallery, founded in 1824 after Parliament purchased 38 paintings from banker John Julius Angerstein, before William Wilkins designed its Trafalgar Square building and generations of acquisitions expanded the collection across European painting from the thirteenth through early twentieth centuries. Conclude at National Portrait Gallery, founded in 1856 after sustained advocacy by Philip Henry Stanhope, Thomas Babington Macaulay and Thomas Carlyle, creating an institution organized around historically significant British lives and later occupying Ewan Christian's purpose-built gallery beside Trafalgar Square. The progression moves from Stoll and Matcham's architecture for mass entertainment through Angerstein and Wilkins's national collection into Stanhope and Christian's institution of British portraiture, placing the design theater of St. Martins Lane London, a Morgans Originals Hotel within Covent Garden's wider culture of performance, art and creative authorship.
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