It was a typical Sunday afternoon in London. Inside The Orange Public House and Hotel near Sloane Square, the locals were engaging in a weekend ritual: Sunday roast. Heaping plates of sliced beef with braised cabbage and crispy potatoes were served up with Yorkshire pudding and gravy. Frothy pints of lager were delivered to wash it all down. And between taking orders and clearing tables, a cheery waitress swiftly tucked my suitcase out of the way and asked me to take a seat: “Your room will be ready soon,” she said, “Would you like a drink while you wait?”
For a first-timer, checking in to a pub for the night is an unconventional experience. At The Orange – a trendy watering hole with four bedrooms on its upper floor – the features of a classic hotel are absent. There's no dedicated reception desk, no porter, and no concierge. Upon arrival, guests have to navigate their way through an often crowded ground-floor bar, up two narrow flights of stairs (bags in hand) to the second-floor dining room.
There, the check-in process takes place at the same counter where drinks are poured. This is, after all, a pub that happens to have some rooms for rent, not a hotel with a bar. On a busy Sunday it feels slightly awkward to stand there with luggage, in the middle of the rush-hour bustle.
And yet, there’s no sense that you’ve intruded and no pressure to get out of the way. Like any good hotel, the welcome is warm and since there’s no lobby, you’re encouraged to treat the pub as your own living space.
The Orange is one of the latest in a spate of restored pubs in and around London that offer good food and drink for the local community, and chic accommodation for those who want to stay for more than a meal. “In recent years, the majority of ‘restaurants with rooms’ have tended to be in rural locations,” says Matt Turner, editor of the hotel design magazine Sleeper. “But for hotel developers, the scarcity of available property in prime city-centre sites makes acquiring pubs for conversion to gastro-pubs with rooms – ‘gastrotels’ even – an appealing proposition.”
London’s Orange Public House has Provençal-inspired decor.
Turner believes that authenticity and a sense of place are more likely found in an 18th-century inn than a fancy new-build hotel. Since many of the gastrotels started off as taverns offering accommodation, hoteliers have managed to spruce them up and convert them back to their original function. In guest rooms, flat-screen TVs and rain-forest showers are as de rigueur as claw-foot tubs and old wooden writing desks. At the same time, the charm of the original structure may restrict the level of luxury one can expect. Bedrooms tend to be on the small side. Heating and air-conditioning systems may seem antiquated. And noise levels may be high both from outside (most pubs are situated on main roads, so hearing traffic is inevitable) and in (depending on the level of soundproofing, you may be kept up by rowdy pubgoers).
