Why you should experience The Franklin, an SLH Hotel in London, England.
The Franklin, an SLH Hotel is a seductive luxury hotel where Knightsbridge's Victorian refinement, Italian sensibility, garden-square intimacy and design pedigree converge across three nineteenth-century townhouses overlooking Egerton Gardens.
Set along Egerton Gardens near Brompton Road and just steps from Holy Trinity Brompton, the hotel occupies three houses dating to the 1840s within the 24-property Egerton Crescent composition designed by architect George Basevi. Starhotels acquired the property in 2014 and commissioned Anouska Hempel to reinterpret the surviving Victorian fabric, bringing the designer who pioneered London's boutique-hotel movement with Blakes in 1978 into direct discussion with Basevi's architecture. Hempel drew from Italy, Morocco, La Belle Époque and Art Deco through Carrara marble, slate, Venetian glass, silks, velvets and mirrored surfaces, establishing a deliberately cosmopolitan interior language behind the restrained red-brick façades. The result is a hotel where George Basevi's nineteenth-century architecture and Anouska Hempel's intensely authored interiors connect Knightsbridge's garden-square tradition with four decades of influential British hotel design.
What you should know about The Franklin.
The Franklin, an SLH Hotel is best known for reopening in autumn 2016 following Starhotels' 2014 acquisition and complete reconstruction of the 35-room property, placing Anouska Hempel at the center of a project created almost four decades after she opened Blakes London and helped establish the modern boutique-hotel vocabulary. Hempel's wider career spans architecture, furniture, haute couture, landscape and yacht design, while Architectural Digest included her among its AD100 designers and her hospitality portfolio expanded from Blakes to The Hempel before reaching The Franklin. The 2016 project preserved original elements while establishing Hempel's Italian-influenced visual character across the property, making the hotel one of the London addresses through which Starhotels Collezione developed its international luxury portfolio. The Franklin's 35 accommodations culminate in named suites including Egerton Grand Suite, Kensington Grand Suite and Presidential Suite, with the 69-square-meter Egerton Grand Suite taking its character from the Egerton family whose name remains embedded in the surrounding streetscape.
Chef Alfredo Russo extended that Italian authorship into The Franklin Restaurant after building his reputation at Dolce Stil Novo inside Venaria Reale near Turin, where his contemporary interpretation of Piedmontese cuisine established the culinary style he brought to London. Roberto Roncolato now leads the restaurant kitchen after a career encompassing Gordon Ramsay's three-MICHELIN-starred Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, Texture, The Langley and DeGusto, where he contributed to the restaurant receiving its first MICHELIN star. Starhotels connects Roncolato's current cooking directly with The Franklin Restaurant, continuing the property's Italian gastronomic character while Anouska Hempel's adjoining bar draws upon the atmosphere of 1920s cocktail culture. Together, Alfredo Russo, Roberto Roncolato, Dolce Stil Novo, Starhotels Collezione and Anouska Hempel give The Franklin, an SLH Hotel a coherent creative lineage extending from Piedmontese gastronomy into one of London's most influential traditions of authored hotel design.
How to fold The Franklin into your trip.
The Franklin, an SLH Hotel works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing Victorian collecting, scientific inquiry and musical patronage through South Kensington and Knightsbridge.
Begin at Leighton House, where painter Frederic Leighton commissioned architect George Aitchison to create his studio-house beginning in the 1860s, later adding the Arab Hall around a collection of Middle Eastern tiles and transforming the residence through successive campaigns into a deeply personal synthesis of art, architecture and collecting. Continue to Natural History Museum, where Alfred Waterhouse's Romanesque building opened in 1881 to house collections championed by Richard Owen, establishing terracotta architecture, zoology, botany, mineralogy and paleontology within one of Victorian Britain's great scientific institutions. Conclude at Royal Albert Hall, opened by Queen Victoria in 1871 as part of Prince Albert's wider vision for a district devoted to arts and sciences, with Henry Cole, Francis Fowke and Henry Darracott Scott shaping a vast elliptical auditorium that became central to London's musical culture. The progression moves from Leighton and Aitchison's intensely personal artistic environment through Waterhouse and Owen's scientific institution into the cultural ambitions of Victoria and Albert, revealing the traditions of collecting, scholarship and performance surrounding The Franklin, an SLH Hotel.
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