The Savoy’s £220m revamp

A gold-leaf lined booth at the Beaufort Bar

For the grande dame of London’s hotels, it has been a difficult, humiliating time. So decrepit had the Savoy’s interiors become that what should have been a 17-month closure and refurbishment has ended up taking almost three years. Many of its antique furnishings and historic artefacts have been auctioned off; all but a handful of staff were made redundant. The bill soared from a projected £100m to £220m, making it the most costly hotel refurbishment in history, while rumours about a possible sale kept circulating.

Adding insult to injury was the fate of the grand entrance, Savoy Court, where for years royalty, prime ministers, and Hollywood stars have stepped out from their Rolls-Royces. Its iconic art deco polished steel sign, marble frontage and statue of Count Peter, who built the first Savoy Palace here in 1263, have been covered up by a vast silver and pink advertising hoarding for Legally Blonde, The Musical. Count Peter would be spinning in his grave.

“There have been some very dark days,” admits Kiaran MacDonald, the general manager. “Almost overnight, on a few occasions, we saw the deviation from projected cost and schedule grow substantially, as the engineers discovered new problems.”

As well as losing an estimated £500,000 revenue for every extra week it remained shut, the slipping schedule played havoc with attempts to headhunt staff from other hotels. Meanwhile the Savoy’s management team were forced to squat in the basement of the restaurant next door beneath a digital display counting down the days until they got their hotel back.

This weekend, though, the nightmare is finally coming to an end. At last, the Legally Blonde hoarding is due to come down, revealing a rejuvenated Savoy Court. The hotel will open to guests next Sunday, on the suitably portentous sounding 10th day of the 10th month 2010 (or simply 10-10-10, as the hotel’s marketeers have it). Will the venerable Savoy be able to live up to the sky-high expectations and hold its own against a host of new London rivals? For next month sees the opening of Waldorf-Astoria’s new property in Syon Park, west London, the newly refurbished Four Seasons opens on Park Lane in December, and they will be followed next year by hotels from the Corinthia, W and Shangri-La chains.

What none of the rivals can come close to matching is the Savoy’s history. Built by the theatre impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte, it opened on August 6, 1889, billed as London’s first luxury hotel. It incorporated numerous technological advances that D’Oyly Carte had experienced while travelling in the US producing the operettas of his friends Gilbert and Sullivan. It was the city’s first hotel to have electric light and the first with electric lifts (initially known as “ascending rooms”). Bedrooms were connected by speaking tubes to the valet, maid and room service waiter, and it later became London’s first hotel in which most bedrooms had bathrooms en-suite.

The first manager was César Ritz, who went on to open his eponymous hotel on Piccadilly only after he had been sacked by the Savoy on suspicion of stealing wine (more than £250,000 worth, at today’s values). The kitchens were under the control of Auguste Escoffier, who famously created two dishes for Dame Nellie Melba, the celebrated soprano and regular guest: Melba Toast for when she was dieting, Peach Melba for when she wasn’t.

For most of the next century, the Savoy’s guestbook was a roll call of celebrity – from Errol Flynn and Katharine Hepburn to Elizabeth Taylor, Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles. Whistler and Monet both painted the views from their bedroom windows. Noël Coward, George Bernard Shaw and HG Wells were all regulars at the American Bar. Vivien Leigh was introduced to Laurence Olivier, whom she later married, in the front hall. And the hotel became known as the setting for London’s most lavish parties, among them a 1905 bash thrown by American millionaire George Kessler to celebrate Edward VII’s birthday. The hotel’s central court was filled with water (as well as salmon and trout) to recreate a Venetian scene, with guests dining in a huge gondola. A cake was brought in by a baby elephant.

It was flamboyant but also deeply connected to the establishment. Princesses Margaret and Elizabeth came to dance at balls, and it was here that Elizabeth was first seen in public with her future husband. Winston Churchill regularly lunched at the hotel during the second world war, and he attended meetings of his Savoy dining society, the Other Club, until his death.

And yet, while such glittering heritage will continue to draw guests, next weekend the Savoy will effectively be starting again. All but 75 of the 650 staff are new, and as I toured the hotel last week, their training sessions were in full swing. In the new Beaufort Bar, a group of eager staff were watching a demonstration from an expert cocktail-shaker (“I like to go for a samba rhythm – the worst kind of shakes are the self-conscious, furtive ones”). In the American Bar, flipcharts advised staff on appropriate language: “somewhat formal, friendly, calm ... NOT aggressive, overfamiliar, sarcastic, rude...”. You might hope that the staff of one of the capital’s most celebrated bars would already know that being sarcastic to customers was bad, but I suppose it doesn’t hurt to make sure.

How successfully they can recreate the Savoy’s atmosphere remains to be seen, but they do have a stunning building in which to work. You only need a quick back of an envelope calculation to know that no expense has been spared. The Savoy has 268 bedrooms, which means the refurbishment has cost more than £800,000 per room – enough to buy a smart family house in most parts of the city. Are the new beds made of gold?

In fact much of the expense, and delay, has come from the need to update the plumbing, electrics and air-conditioning. “They are not the most interesting things, not something the guests would even notice, but the fact is that ours were in very poor state of repair and so it needed an awful lot of invasive work,” says MacDonald. Worse was that ripping out electrics and plumbing meant disturbing the asbestos deep within the building’s fabric, which then had to be painstakingly removed. Another major problem was the result of a bodged extension in 1910, when the hotel’s riverside wall was pushed out to incorporate the balconies. Engineers found the new wall had been “hung” from beams in the roof rather than being built on proper foundations. It needed 200 tons of steel to shore up the structure.

But plumbing and electrics aside, returning guests will notice big improvements. Arriving in Savoy Court, the only road in Britain where cars must drive on the right, they will be greeted by a new Lalique crystal fountain. The front hall, the main reception area, has been transformed with a new marble floor, white marble columns, and the removal of check-in desks – guests will be greeted and taken straight to their rooms. There is a new colour scheme of white and “celadon”, a light green that is used extensively throughout the hotel, and the lighter, brighter, colours mean the original frieze around the top of the room suddenly becomes far more noticeable. “It’s as if someone has turned on the light for the first time,” says MacDonald.

At the centre of the hotel, the Thames Foyer, where afternoon tea is taken, is also far brighter, thanks to a huge new cupola, modelled on the original which was covered over during the second world war blackout. Next door is the dramatic black and gold Beaufort Bar, which will host cabaret on a stage where Gershwin and Sinatra have performed, but which in recent years had been curtained-off and used to store chairs.

Throughout, the materials exude class, from the ornate fabric wall coverings in the Upper Thames Foyer, to the polished sycamore panelling in the River Restaurant, and gold-leaf lining of the booths in the Beaufort Bar.

Personally, I’m less keen on the colossal metal gazebo in the centre of the Thames Foyer, which seems to loom oppressively over the tea tables. And I’m not at all sure about the winter-garden trellis work on the walls of the Royal Suite – trellises being just a little too popular in motorway service station cafeterias for them not to look naff in a £10,000-a-night suite. There are compensations, though – a £25,000 bed, mirrors that turn into televisions and an air-conditioned shoe cupboard.

With the other bedrooms, designer Pierre-Yves Rochon’s main job has been to untangle the mix of Edwardian and art deco that had evolved over the years. Now guests choose one distinct style or the other. The 94 art deco rooms have cream tones, period maple furniture, murano glass chandeliers and black and white marble bathrooms; the 174 Edwardian rooms have rich floral bedding and curtains. The biggest change is in the river-view suites, where the bathrooms were once adjacent to the outside wall. These have been brought further inside the building, so they no longer block the river views, the best of any London hotel.

The refurbishment’s quality and attention to detail is clear, but there’s nothing revolutionary, no modern equivalent of the speaking-tubes or electric lifts to wow a new generation of Savoy clientele. “We like the word ‘understated’,” says MacDonald. “It’s refined rather than showy.”

In truth, the new Savoy was never going to be cutting edge, as it was in 1930 when the chairman, Rupert D’Oyly Carte, said the hotel “is always up-to-date and, if possible, a little ahead”. But it is, once again, genuinely grand, and it’s hard not to be impressed by a hotel that has 51,000 pieces of china specially made by Wedgwood to exactly match the paint on the walls.

And in retrospect, perhaps the timing of the refurbishment hasn’t been too bad after all. Data from the booking agency Hotels.com showed that global room rates rose in the second quarter of 2010, the first rise since 2007, and a report from PricewaterhouseCoopers last month predicted record London room rates in 2011. Moreover, the 2012 Olympics should boost visitor numbers, counteracting a possible fall in bookings once the initial interest in the refurbishment has worn off. If you had to close your luxury hotel for three years, 2007 to 2010 was probably a very good time to do so.

“I think that when people walk in next weekend and see the transformation, the issues of cost and delays will become yesterday’s story,” says MacDonald. “I think people will turn round and say: ‘Absolutely, I can see why it cost that much – in fact, I’m surprised it wasn’t more!”

The Savoy, The Strand, London; www.the-savoy.com . Doubles from £350

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From Monet to Monroe

1889

The Savoy opens with dazzling innovations such as electric lights and lifts

1897

Guccio Gucci, founder of the Gucci fashion empire, gets a job as a dishwasher at the Savoy, later rising to waiter

1899

Claude Monet stays at the hotel, painting the view from his window

1906

César Ritz, who was the Savoy’s first manager but had been sacked, opens his own rival hotel, the Ritz

1929

The iconic art deco steel sign is erected over Savoy Court

1937

George VI dines at the Savoy, the first reigning British monarch ever to dine in a hotel

1956

Marilyn Monroe gives her first ever British press conference at the hotel, causing a stir with a dress with a transparent midriff

1965

The Beatles come to visit Bob Dylan who is staying at the hotel, and apparently order porridge and pea sandwiches

2005

The hotel is jointly purchased by Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia and HBOS, and is managed by Fairmont, the Canadian-based hotel company

2007

The hotel closes for what was intended to be a 17-month, £100m refurbishment; 3,000 pieces of furniture and artefacts are sold off at auction, including the chair Monroe sat on in 1956

2010

The refurbishment takes almost three years and costs £220m, but the hotel is finally due to reopen on October 10