In sprawling London, especially during design week, it can feel like traversing the earth as you go from one neighborhood to another.
During the London Design Festival, I was excited to spend more time in Shoreditch for the inaugural Shoreditch Design Week, an expansion of the neighborhood’s annual programming. I booked a stay at the new Aethos London Shoreditch so I could enjoy more time in the area without the heavy back-and-forth from east to west and back again, and it ended up being the reset I didn’t know I needed.
Aethos is the European boutique hotel and members’ club brand’s first UK location, taking over the former Nobu Hotel on Willow Street. With 164 rooms, it’s a sizable hotel, but it doesn’t feel like one once you’re inside. The London outpost is also conceived as a members’ club, with programming built around food, culture and wellness.
Barcelona-based Astet Studio designed the interiors, working with the existing architecture while bringing in terracotta, brushed metal, layered woods, bespoke lighting, and pieces made by local artisans. It’s very contemporary, but still cozy, and one of the first things I noticed was the amount of natural light throughout the hotel.
The bedrooms are surprisingly large for London. Mine had plenty of room to actually settle in rather than maneuver around a bed and suitcase, and huge windows brought in lots of daylight. After long days running around design week, that space made a bigger difference than I expected.
The hotel has a small spa with a steam room, a great gym with all the essentials, and a separate lounge for yoga and other workout classes. The hotel describes wellbeing as one of the pillars of its membership concept, which includes a substantial menu of vitamin IV drips - great for the occasional hangover or jetlag (or both) - alongside food, cultural programming, and experiences around the city. The spa and training studio are also designed around treatments and technologies connected to longevity and general wellbeing.
A highlight was dinner at Mitzu, the hotel’s Japanese restaurant. London’s restaurant scene has started to feel a bit rushed lately, with limits on how long you can sit at a table and constant checking in, so it was refreshing to have a dinner that felt relaxed, with mood lighting and a DJ set that set a luxurious and ambient tone, reminiscent of Tao in New York City (in the good old days!).
The menu centers on Japanese cooking with an emphasis on seasonality and simplicity, and the atmosphere works equally well for an intimate dinner or a more social evening. It was exactly what I wanted after a long day running around Design Week. Great food, relaxed ambiance, a beautiful setting, and nowhere else I needed to be.
What I liked most about staying at Aethos was quite simple: it changed the way I experienced that week. Instead of treating Shoreditch as somewhere I needed to commute to for an opening and then immediately leave, I could stay in the neighborhood, walk between events, come back to the hotel, use the steam room, change for dinner, and head out again.
London Design Festival can quickly become an exercise in logistics, and the best way to experience London is one neighborhood at a time.
Aethos gave me an excuse to do exactly that - and somewhere in between Shoreditch Design Week, the steam room, and dinner downstairs, my design week became a little bit of a vacation.
Aethos London Shoreditch
Photography courtesy of the property.
