The Ritz London is a 5-star luxury hotel at 150 Piccadilly in London, England. A symbol of high society and luxury, it is considered one of the world's most prestigious and best known hotels. The Ritz has become so associated with luxury and elegance that the word "ritzy" has entered the English language to denote something that is ostentatiously stylish, fancy, or fashionable."Ritzy" meaning in the Cambridge English DictionaryDefinition of "ritzy" by Merriam-Webster"Ritzy" at Wiktionary
The hotel was opened by Swiss hotelier César Ritz in 1906, eight years after he established the Hôtel Ritz Paris. It began to gain popularity towards the end of World War I, with politicians, socialites, writers and actors in particular. David Lloyd George held a number of secret meetings at the Ritz during the latter half of the war, and it was at the Ritz that he made the decision to intervene on behalf of Greece against the Ottoman Empire. Noël Coward was among the diners at the Ritz in the 1920s and 1930s.
Owned by the Bracewell Smith family until 1976, David and Frederick Barclay purchased the hotel for £80 million in 1995. They spent eight years and £40 million restoring it to its former grandeur. In 2002, it became the first hotel to receive a Royal warrant from the Prince of Wales for its banquet and catering services. In 2020, it was sold to a Qatari investor, under a cloud of family tension.
The Grade II listed building's exterior is structurally and visually Franco-American in style, with little trace of English architecture, and it is heavily influenced by the architectural traditions of Paris. The facade is on the Piccadilly side, on the Arlington Street side, and on the Green Park side. At the corners of the pavilion roofs of the Ritz are large green copper lions, the emblem of the hotel. The Ritz has 111 rooms and 25 suites.
The interior was designed mainly by London and Paris based designers in the Louis XVI style. Architectural historian Marcus Binney describes the great suite of ground-floor rooms as "one of the all-time masterpieces of hotel architecture" and compares it to a royal palace with its "grand vistas, lofty proportions and sparkling chandeliers".
The Ritz's most widely known facility is the Palm Court, which hosts the "Tea at the Ritz". It is decorated in a cream-coloured Louis XVI style, with panelled mirrors in gilt-bronze frames. The hotel has six private dining rooms – the Marie Antoinette Suite, with its boiserie, and the rooms within the Grade II* listed William Kent House. The Rivoli Bar, built in the Art Deco style, was designed in 2001 by interior designer Tessa Kennedy to resemble the bar on the Orient Express.
History Construction and early history
Swiss hotelier César Ritz, the former manager of the Savoy Hotel, opened the hotel on 25 May 1906. It was built on the site which had been the Old White Horse Cellar, which by 1805 was one of the best known coaching inns in England. The financial backers of the Ritz felt that they had secured one of the prime sites in London for their project. They began negotiations in 1901, and completed the transactions for the simultaneous purchase of the leasehold for the Walsingham House Hotel and the adjacent freehold estate of the Bath Hotel for £250,000 in 1902. Demolition of both of the hotels began in 1904.
The building is neoclassical in the Louis XVI style, built during the Belle Époque to resemble a Parisian apartment block, over arcades that consciously evoked the Rue de Rivoli. Its architects were Charles Mewès, who had previously designed Ritz's Hôtel Ritz Paris, and Arthur Davis, with engineering collaboration by the Swedish engineer Sven Bylander. It was one of the earliest substantial steel frame structures in London, the Savoy Hotel extension of 1903-04 being the first in the capital. Many of the materials used in the construction of the hotel were US-made. The initial fees for suites ranged from 1½ to 3½ guineas.
After opening, a long-running feud between the hotel and Lord Wimbourne, a steel magnate who lived next door at Wimbourne House, lasted for years in a dispute over land. A number of locals were also concerned about the building and the impact it would have on their health.
While the Ritz was still under construction, a series of events highlighted the need for another luxury hotel in London. A 3June 1905 Daily Mail news story reported it was both Derby Week and the height of the tourist season, making hotel accommodation almost impossible to find. The Savoy had to refuse reservations, while Buckingham Palace turned offices into makeshift hotel rooms for visitors. An estimated 2,500 more persons needing rooms were expected shortly with the coming visit of the King of Spain.
Though the opening of the Savoy had brought about a marked change in how hotels provided services to its guests, Ritz was determined that his London hotel would surpass its competitor in their delivery. The Ritz installed two large lead-lined tanks on its roof to provide a steady stream of hot and cold water. The hotel's bathrooms were all spacious with each having its own heated towel bar. Every bedroom in the hotel was provided with its own working fireplace.
Ritz shunned free-standing wardrobes due to his fear of dust settling on them; instead he built cupboards into the rooms with doors matching the panelling. Ritz's ideas of cleanliness and hygiene prompted him to originally have all bedrooms painted in white and all beds made of brass, not wood, for the same reasons. Anything new or potentially useful was available to the guests of the Ritz.
César Ritz's health had declined after his 1902 collapse at the Carlton, but he was feeling well enough to assume an active role in the plans for the hotel's opening dinner on 24 May 1906. Unlike the opening of the Paris Ritz, which had catered to society, most of those invited to the Ritz, London opening were members of the national and international press. Major British newspapers such as the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror and The Daily Telegraph were invited to the dinner along with newspapers which included the Berliner Tageblatt, The Sydney Morning Herald and The New York Times. Ritz's guest list also included the engineer and architects of the structure along with key staff members of the new hotel and their wives.
The hotel was not immensely profitable in its opening years; smaller than many of the new hotels springing up in that period, it was not fashionable initially, and was resented by many of the London elite who considered it vulgar. It took £3628 in 1908, over a thousand pounds less than the previous year, and the hotel lost over £50,000 between 15 May 1906 and 31 July 1908, which led to the replacement of the manager Elles with Theodore Kroell and appointment of Charles Van Gyzelen as manager of the restaurant.
The hotel also suffered a blow upon the death of King Edward in 1910, when 38 planned dinners and functions were cancelled, but began to prosper the following year, made fashionable by the Prince of Wales who regularly dined here. King Edward was particularly fond of the cakes made at the Ritz. The hotel would regularly send him a supply, but this was kept in confidence so as to not embarrass the King's personal chef. Ritz retained control of much of the hotel's operation for many years. He hired Auguste Escoffier to provide cuisine to match the opulence of the hotel's decorations; he placed a special bell in the entryway by which the doorman could notify the staff of the impending arrival of royalty. By 1929 the hotel was still being praised for its architecture; Professor Charles Reilly wrote about the Ritz in Building magazine in 1929, calling it the "finest modern structure" in the street, with "an elegance of general form".
High society
On 4 August 1914, Lady Diana Cooper's future husband, Duff Cooper, then a Foreign Office official, dined at the Ritz with the Earl of Essex and his American wife, Adele Capell (née Grant) and Patrick Shaw-Stewart, and later that day announced that World War I had broken out to the party. Before the war began, the German and Austrian embassies both retained tables at the Ritz Restaurant. The hotel suffered during the war, and lost nearly £50,000 in 1915 alone; the ballroom was usually empty and lights went out by 10pm, but rooms were still in demand and the hoteliers believed it to be worth keeping open. Socialites such as Lady Cynthia Asquith, daughter-in-law of H. H. Asquith and Lord Basil Blackwood were documented in her diaries to have dined at the Ritz in the spring of 1916. The following year, she held a lavish dinner party with the likes of Osbert Sitwell, Gilbert Russell and Maud Julia Augusta Russell and Clare Tennant.
In September 1917, a shell exploded in Green Park in close proximity to the Ritz, and according to Lord Ivor Churchill it broke all of the windows to adjacent Wimbourne House. David Lloyd George held a number of secret meetings at the Ritz during the latter half of the war, organised by Sir Basil Zaharoff, and it was at the Ritz that he made the decision to intervene on behalf of Greece against Turkey. The Duke of Marlborough recorded dining at the Ritz; "I lunched at the Ritz. The whole social world goes there, prices being cheap. All women there from M. Paget to the latest tart." A November 1917 article in the Daily Herald titled "How they starve at the Ritz" detailed the lavish meals on offer despite national food shortages. The story was extensively reprinted in leaflets and some historians believe that it pushed the government into introducing compulsory rationing.
When asked to summarise hotels in London in the early 1920s, Barbara Cartland remarked that "The Ritz stood for stuffiness and standards, the Carlton was for businessman, the Savoy was rather fast, some other ones were frankly scandalous, and the Berkeley, where you could dance all night for ten shillings, was for the young". In 1921, Bonvin, the manager of the Ritz, died, and was replaced with J.S. Walters. Walters was a "tireless salesman" in promoting the hotel, especially in mainland Europe, and flaunted the hotel in the Tatler at a time when it was unpopular to do so. Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma frequented the Ritz from his time as a Sub-Lieutenant onwards, and when his friend Charlie Chaplin arrived in London in September 1921 after a nine-year absence, great crowds gathered at Waterloo station and Chaplin had to be ushered to the hotel by some 40 policemen. He stayed in the first-floor Regal Suite and was photographed throwing carnations to his fans from the Arlington Street balcony. After the stir Chaplin's stay caused, the Ritz manager vowed to "never again" have film stars as guests at the Ritz.