Hotel Reviews
london gatwick: how to avoid red-eye
If you’re taking Sterling’s new early morning flight from London Gatwick to Copenhagen, it’s worth considering a night near the airport. Felbridge Hotel & Spa, a 10-minute cab ride from Gatwick, offers decently priced spa, dinner and room packages year-round. The four-star hotel’s design may be more corporate than charming but beds are soft, food and wine in both restaurant and bar is excellent, and rooms have all mod cons including flat screen TVs, 24-hour room service and internet access. Elemis-trained staff at the Chakra spa offer top-notch facials, hot stone massages and a Jessica nail bar. There’s also an elegant kidney-shaped pool and a gym, as well as a steam room and sauna to relax in after that schlep out of central London. On Sterling magazine’s visit, service, spa treatments and dinner at the award-winning Anise restaurant were all faultless. Our hotel spy reports that she would have had a blissfully restful night before taking the 8.55am to Copenhagen, if only her partner hadn’t snored like a buzzsaw.
Until end of August, The Felbridge is offering £115 (approx. €144) for a double room, one night, plus guarded parking for your car for up to eight nights. The Felbridge Hotel, London Road, East Grinstead, West Sussex, +44 (0)1342 337 700, www.felbridgehotel.co.uk
first impressions café du vaudeville, brussels
Sterling magazine’s rating:
So historic it doesn’t even have landlines…
Pierre Piwonski is not your average hotelier. A former Jesuit priest from Poland, he’s now running the celebrated Café du Vaudeville in Brussels’ ultra-chic Galerie de la Reine. This royal shopping mall was one of the first ever opened in Europe. In the mid to late 1800s, Victor Hugo, Auguste Rodin, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx were all known to have hung out around the Vaudeville with its 260-seater theatre and café. Today it is relatively unchanged and has been recently spruced up. Now Pierre has turned some of the upstairs apartments into hotel rooms, each with its own distinctive style: ‘colonial’, ‘mimimalist’, ‘operatic’ to name three.
On Sterling’s test-run visit everything was so new the Plasma TVs hadn’t even arrived. In-room Wifiwas being installed but there won’t be external phone lines. (Do cell phones make landlines redundant? We doubt it, but time will tell.) Pierre told us that he wants to create a home-like vibe as far away as possible from the average hotel experience. Accordingly, there’s no reception desk and you come and go as you please via your own front door. While this makes for a great alternative to holing up in some hotel chain – of which Brussels has too many – you do long occasionally for a concierge. But if location matters most to you, then there is nowhere classier or more convenient to stay in the capital. ADRIAN MOURBY
» Fly Sterling to Brussels
Rooms from €120. Café du Vaudeville, Galerie de la Reine 11, Brussels, +32 (0)2 511 2345 www.cafeduvaudeville.be
dopplr cosies up with mr & mrs smith
Dopplr, the online networking service for frequent business travellers, has hopped into bed with boutique hotel experts Mr & Mrs Smith. From now on, those who use Dopplr to share travel plans with frequent-flying colleagues and friends around the world will have direct access to Mr & Mrs Smith’s collection of over 400 hand-picked boutique hotels, plus offers, reviews and travel-booking services. Sounds like they’ve got the business-to-pleasure ratio sussed. All you need now is a very important conference in the Greek isles. www.dopplr.com, www.mrandmrssmith.com
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