South Place Hotel, Purdey & Steed

Always a lovely experience coming here, the pancake breakfast is amazing! Great service with very friendly staff. Touch controls in the room are not always intuitive and the design of the shower in the bath means there can be quite a lot of water outside the bathtub when you've finished. Minor issues really, although one plug for the kettle and coffee machine is a bit tight - mind you don't scold yourself when plugging and unplugging... Very close to Northern and District line tubes, great to explore any part of London from.

This hotel is listed as 5-star, but our 1-night stay didn’t really feel like it. The staff were fine, and the rooms are beautiful, despite the peeling wood at the bottom of the doors and drawers. The biggest issue was the AC. We arrived after midnight, and the room was absolutely freezing — as cold as outside. The AC was set to 15.5°C, so we turned it up to the highest possible temp, 27.5°C expecting it to get warmer… but it didn’t. It just kept blowing cold air. There was no way to change it from AC to heating mode. We called reception and they offered a small Dyson heater quite quickly, which made us feel like they probably expected this. The problem was, the AC was still blowing cold air into the room at the same time. We had turned it off before the staff member even arrived, but it continued running and blowing cold air for a long time after. So we had this tiny heater trying to warm the room while cold air was actively being pumped in. It made no sense. There was no option to switch the system to an actual heating mode — you could only increase the temperature of the aircon, which still blew cold. In the end, we were moved to a smaller room, which was half the size of the room he paid for, which isn’t very fair. The system there also didn’t produce heat, but at least when we turned it off, it actually turned off, which made it more bearable. For a 5-star hotel in London in winter, not having a working heating system — or even a proper heating setting — is pretty surprising. Even travelodge or premier inn have heating u can regulate… On top of that, there were moths in the room. One flew out of the wardrobe when I opened it for a robe, and they were on the walls. The robes themselves felt have never seen fabric softener in their lives. They were crunchy and FILLED the room with dust. Overall, it looked nice, but not quite the five-star experience we expected. My boyfriend booked it as a valentines suprise, and all this faffing interrupted the valentines romance a bit.