Browns Hotel - London

"Without question one of the FINEST hotels we have EVER stayed in!!!! After 10 days in South Africa including many days on safari, we were unable to return to the US because of the recent blizzard. Our travel company arranged for us to stay at Brown’s. The staff was exceptional in every sense. Our concierge made lovely and delicious recommendations for dinners and were near our hotel. Our room was lovely. We had the occasion to receive flowers and they were gorgeous!! Our compliments to the hotel florist. The reception and door staff were always warm and we were almost always greeted by name. As a previous reviewer said “ Charm meets Perfection!!"

"I recently visited Browns with my partner for afternoon tea in the Drawing Room to celebrate my birthday. The service was impeccable and the tea itself delicious and the ambience was wonderful when we arrived - an elegant wood panelled drawing room with a pianist playing a lovely old grand piano.... It was perfect, until… two other guests arrived, the gentleman wearing a tea shirt (with one arm covered in tattoos) and jeans and both wearing white trainers, at which point the elegant tone of the drawing room plummeted. More guests came in: parents with their teenage son, who was scruffily dressed in a sweatshirt and baggy jeans and trainers. I asked my partner if there was a dress code, as I could not believe that Browns would allow such scruffily dressed individuals to spoil an otherwise elegant ambiance in the drawing room that Browns has cleared thought hard about to create. It would appear that the answer from your website is no, since your website says: Dress Code We wish for everyone to feel comfortable, so whilst we do not operate a dress code, we kindly ask that our guests are respectful of the environment we have created here at Brown's Hotel. Our guests within the hotel usually opt for a smart-casual style. Clearly, trusting your patrons to respect the “environment that we have created at Browns Hotel etc” DOES NOT WORK and the individuals whom I saw paid no heed to this request whatever. When one is paying £200 for a champagne afternoon tea in London’s oldest hotel, one does not expect to be sitting with slovenly-looking people who look like more like they’re heading to a McDonalds, as opposed to a smart London hotel, whose complete lack of consideration and regard for suitable smart attire and their fellow diners, is completely lacking. Furthermore, whilst the waiters were smartly dressed, the waitresses looked more like they had a casual housekeeper's dress on, and one of them we saw had an arm similarly plastered in unsightly and unsavoury tattoos, which is totally incongruous with a smart 5 star hotel. On a separate note, we were expecting the décor of London’s oldest hotel to be more traditional in style and sympathetic towards the building’s Georgian origins (more akin to a traditional country house, as other, similar hotels have done) and not have some of your light fittings (in the Drawing Room) and modern art look as though they’d been bought from an IKEA and were going into a 'living room' rather than a 'drawing room'. How can such a hitherto smart hotel with high standards of style have been allowed to descend to the lowest common denominator in attire and lack of smartness? I’m sorry to say that I will not be able to recommend Browns to any friends nor will I be hurrying back."

"Exceptional staff - hugely helpful from the second you arrive until the moment you depart. Rooms are very comfortable and the location is great. Highly recommend."