Mandarin Oriental, Hyde Park

Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park stands between the shops of Knightsbridge and the open lawns of Hyde Park, in a building that began as Hyde Park Court, a block of luxury apartments, and opened as the Hyde Park Hotel in 1902. Mandarin Oriental has run it since 1996, and its park-side entrance is still reserved for royal use. In 2019 the designer Joyce Wang completed a full renovation that draws on the park and on the glamour of early twentieth-century travel. In the lobby, blond burl wood and glass chandeliers frame an artwork inspired by the bark of Hyde Park’s plane trees. Most of the 181 rooms and suites look over the park or the skyline, with Art Deco touches and custom furniture, and the suites have small libraries chosen by the bookseller Heywood Hill. Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, the hotel’s best-known restaurant, revisits historic British recipes. Photographs by Mary McCartney hang in the hotel, and The Aubrey, a Japanese izakaya, displays more than 250 works linked to Japonisme.