At the corner of Piccadilly and Green Park stands one of London’s most quietly storied buildings, a grand Georgian mansion whose separate carriage gates, famously signposted with the words In and Out, gave a beloved gentlemen’s club its nickname for more than a century. After years of painstaking restoration, the address is set to return to public life later this year as Cambridge House, the first London hotel in the Auberge Resorts Collection.
An address with a memory
The house at 94 Piccadilly has been a gathering place for the great and the influential since the eighteenth century. Commissioned by the 2nd Earl of Egremont in 1756 as a Palladian-style townhouse built to entertain the political and social elite, the Grade I-listed building has hosted Queen Victoria, served as Prime Minister Lord Palmerston’s proxy No. 10 Downing Street, and housed the Naval and Military Club from 1865 to 1999. Its survival, in a city that has so often sacrificed its heritage to expedience, is itself remarkable. Its careful renewal, preserving the original eighteenth-century grand staircase, the nineteenth-century ballroom and the formal receiving rooms, is rarer still.
© Cambridge House, Auberge Collection
The Auberge arrival
For Auberge Resorts Collection, a portfolio known for properties of singular character rather than uniform branding, Cambridge House marks a significant moment: its debut in the British capital. The 102-room hotel, designed by Jean-Louis Deniot and Laura Gonzales, has been conceived not as another polished but predictable luxury address, but as a living social hub. A destination restaurant, a constellation of bars and lounges, event spaces of genuine grandeur, and a subterranean private members’ club that revives the building’s clubbable past in contemporary form. The project is part of Reuben Brothers’ £1 billion regeneration of the 1.3-acre Piccadilly Estate.
Below ground, a generously scaled spa will offer extensive hydrotherapy facilities and a heated pool, while above, many of the rooms will look out across the green expanse of the park. The brief throughout has been to let the architecture’s character lead.
A London original
What makes Cambridge House compelling is not its newness but its rootedness. In an era of copy-and-paste luxury, here is a hotel that could exist nowhere else, its identity inseparable from a specific building, a specific street and a specific history. It joins a small and rarefied category of European hotels that derive their power from heritage rather than spectacle, a tradition we explored in our look at historic European hotels that define timeless luxury.
For a city already rich in grand hotels, Cambridge House promises something genuinely distinct: not merely a place to stay, but the revival of an address that London never quite forgot. Learn more at the official home of Cambridge House, Auberge Resorts Collection.
Featured photo: © Cambridge House, Auberge Collection