One of the world’s hippest hotel brands has made its Scottish debut. So what sets Edinburgh’s Hoxton apart from its stablemates?
Millennials, and the generations clipping our heels, don’t really like chains. Restaurants, hotels, coffee shops – if it’s a toss-up between a cookie-cutter corporation and an indie spot, we’ll almost always choose the place that has a bit of authenticity and character. We want experiences. We want patter. We want to stick it to the man. So why do I, a card-carrying 38-year-old who has started to give Black Sheep Coffee the side-eye I once reserved for Starbucks, love The Hoxton so much?
When I learnt two years ago that The Hoxton would be laying down roots in Edinburgh, I messaged my husband immediately. We’d not long returned from a trip to Barcelona, where we’d spent a few days eating tacos and getting tequila-drunk by the rooftop pool at The Hoxton in the Poblenou district. “Not sure we have the climate to support that kind of endeavour in Scotland,” I said. “But keen to see what they’ll do.”
The hotel brand has a presence in some of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities, from Berlin to New York, and all are different. “We always want to ensure it doesn’t feel like just another hotel,” says Martina Luger, group chief brand and culture officer at Ennismore, the global hospitality company that owns The Hoxton and several other hotel groups (including, since 2015, Gleneagles).
“Each property has a distinctive personality that is rooted in the neighbourhood it calls home, yet there’s always that unmistakable Hox feeling – warm, inclusive and designled without being intimidating.” Edinburgh’s outpost is on Grosvenor Street in Haymarket, in a row of converted Victorian flats that once housed a Hilton hotel. If its predecessor was a middle-aged guy in a grey suit, The Hoxton is his 20-something kid who went to art school.
Ennismore’s in-house AIME Studios has woven an artistic sensibility into the interiors, which are playful but homely. The open-plan, chequered-tiled lobby is cleverly zoned with lots of nooks to relax in, whether that’s on a curved, ’70s-style sofa or at the brass-wrapped bar in the hug of a tub chair. I spot a few vintage mid-century pieces as well as works by local artists, including a Jasmine Linington seaweed tapestry above a fireplace. The hangout areas are sectioned off by open shelves, warmly lit by table lamps and scattered with footstools, coffee-table books and rugs; each one a stylish living room vignette. The guests, a mostly younger crowd, appear to be right at home.
Social spaces matter in a hotel like this, because many of the guests, like us, are staying in a compact bedroom. We’re in a ‘Cosy Up’ room; beautifully styled with seafoam-green walls, a cherry-red scalloped headboard on our king-size bed and a monochrome-tiled bathroom, but not large enough to sprawl out in. There are roomier options (the ‘Biggy’, for instance, sleeps two adults and a child, and later this year the hotel will offer three-bed apartments with a kitchen and lounge), but most folk are on a city break and don’t mind if their room is just a place to lay their head at night.
This is an excerpt from issue 162 of Homes & Interiors Scotland. Want to read more about The Hoxton? Buy your issue here.
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