The collaboration between Château La Coste at The Marylebone is, on paper, an unlikely proposition: a Provençal vineyard and arts estate transplanted into the cobblestoned margins of W1, where the most pressing ambient sound is usually a black cab negotiating a turning circle. And yet it works, with a quietness and confidence that the best hotel experiences tend to share.
The Marylebone sits at 47 Welbeck Street, part of The Doyle Collection, an Irish family-owned luxury hotel group with properties spanning Dublin, London, Washington DC, Cork and Bristol. The hotel’s five-star credentials are worn lightly. Arriving, you notice the design before you notice the service, which is itself a kind of compliment: the interiors have been considered seriously enough to stand on their own terms, all rich oranges and soft upholstery, with the sort of offbeat homeware choices, an oversized lamp with fur tousling from its shade, a base cast in bronze duck legs, that signal someone with genuine taste made these decisions, rather than a committee trying to appear as if they had.
A Room That Makes London Feel Optional
The rooms are colourful without being insistent about it. On a recent stay, the terrace proved the hotel’s best argument for itself: a sweep of chimneys and glass, the city laid out in its unresolved complexity below, softened at dusk when the surrounding brickwork picked up the same tangerine warmth as the interiors. The Marylebone’s particular trick is making you feel you have escaped London while still being entirely, pleasurably inside it. According to Yummy Mummy Kitchen, room rates start at around £300 to £600 per night depending on room type and season, and the nearest Tube is Bond Street on the Central and Jubilee lines, should you ever feel compelled to leave.
For those seeking something closer to stillness, the Château La Coste at The Marylebone experience offers an additional reason to stay put. The collaboration takes place at La Terrasse on the Lane, the outdoor dining space at 108 Brasserie, overlooking Marylebone Lane’s shopfronts and their particular brand of independent-London charm. Cream walls are dressed with hanging vines; circular tables sit inside wicker chairs; the whole arrangement transforms what might otherwise read as a functional terrace into something with a genuinely unhurried atmosphere.
The Château La Coste Experience: Wine, Olive Oil and a Cherry Clafoutis
Château La Coste itself is a vineyard, arts centre and estate in the south of France, one that also houses restaurants and a boutique hotel. Its presence at The Marylebone arrives via its wines, poured by the magnum into elegant glassware: light, fruity, the kind that encourages conversation rather than competing with it. The Provençal influence on the menu is similarly unshowy. There is creamy, spiced lobster piled onto a buttery brioche roll; a seafood platter of crab, smoked salmon, mackerel and prawns. A cherry clafoutis arrives for dessert, paired with olive oil ice cream made using Château La Coste’s own organic extra virgin olive oil, a detail that, more than anything else on the menu, captures the estate’s particular character: produce with genuine provenance, used without ceremony.
What the collaboration understands, and what a lesser partnership might have fluffed, is that it does not attempt to disguise either of its sources. London is present in the cobblestones below and the city skyline above; Provence is present in the wine, the olive oil, the unhurried pace of a long summer lunch. Neither is costumed or apologetic. The result is a space that belongs to both, fully and simultaneously, which is a harder effect to achieve than it sounds.
The Château La Coste at The Marylebone experience is available at La Terrasse on the Lane at 108 Brasserie, 47 Welbeck Street, London W1G 8DN.
