The grand hotel taste forgot to ruin

There is a particular kind of disappointment reserved for the grand hotel that has been brought up to date. The lobby that once had weight now has a feature wall. The bar that knew how to keep a secret now photographs well. Most renovations are an apology for the building's age. This one was not.

The booking was made under no name anyone would recognise, the bill settled in full, and the stay arranged like any other guest's - which is the only way a verdict here means anything. Two nights, off-season, deliberately ordinary. No tour, no host, no list of features read aloud at check-in.

What strikes you first is the restraint. The original floor was kept, scars and all. The lighting was lowered rather than brightened, on the apparently radical theory that a room can be flattering instead of merely visible. Nothing here is trying to look new. It is trying to look like it was always this good, which is a far harder thing to fake.

A renovation is a sentence about the past. Most are an apology. This one was a defence.

The rooms

Upstairs, the discipline holds. The wardrobe is the wrong kind of wood by current taste and exactly the right kind by any older one. The bath fittings are heavy in the hand - the single most reliable tell of a hotel that spent money where guests touch rather than where cameras point.

There are failures, and it would be dishonest not to name them. The restaurant has been handed to a concept that does not suit the room. The spa is a different hotel entirely, imported wholesale from somewhere with worse taste and better margins. But these are departments. The building itself - the thing you cannot renovate your way back into once it is gone - survived.