Ok London. Bring us your fireplaces and thick curtains and waffleprint bathrobes and bedrooms with claw-footed bathtubs and beds large and comfortable enough to treat like a destination in their own right. Tis the season to embrace hotels that give you every reason not to leave their walls for the entirety of your stay.
The Hoxton, Shepherd's Bush
The other outposts of the Hoxton in London — Shoreditch, Southwark, Holborn — could also claim a place on this list, with their accurately-named Cosy bedrooms and the kind of flourishes over the different hotels that make us want to rush headlong into winter: the big sofa-adjacent fireplaces in Shoreditch; the rooftop Seabird restaurant in Southwark scattered with Slim Aarons winter photography prints.
But extra points to Shepherd's Bush for having an in-house restaurant — chef Kris Yenbamroong's Chet's — delivering Thai-LA fusion dishes so spicy they'll put a thick layer of warmth between you and the winter outside: drink lip-numbingly hot twists on a Caesar and eat chilli-heavy salads, tuna larb melts and bodega rolls stuffed with sai ua sausage till you're radiating heat... then curl up in bed for a long, long sleep, thanks to the Hoxton's choose-your-own-checkout-time policy.
The Hoxton, Shepherd's Bush
One Hundred Shoreditch
Many things could contribute to One Hundred Shoreditch being generally good as a hotel — expansive rooftop bar, the compact cool of the rooms and probably also some lingering affection we've transferred across from the excellent Ace Shoreditch that used to stand on this spot — but the cosiness comes down entirely to the bed and the bedding. These have to be some of the most comfortable London hotel beds we've ever slept in, possibly they are, actually, The Most. They get referred to as 'our marshmallow beds' on the website and if we'd never stayed there we'd find the image it conjures up sticky and disconcerting, but having slept in one? Impossibly alluring.
The Rookery, Clerkenwell
By the team behind Hazlitt's in Soho and Batty Langley's in Spitalfields, the Rookery's a warren of rooms down a Clerkenwell sidestreet, crammed with deep armchairs, dark wooden cabinets and leatherbound books. And the Rook's Nest suite — with its porthole window and sloping ceiling and soft carpets and four poster bed — gives a feeling of very elegant seclusion, while at the same time just being a short flight of stairs away from the hotel's fireplaces and library and honesty bar. A good place to go full hibernation.
The Rookery, Clerkenwell
The Bedford, Balham
Like a big hug of a hotel, The Bedford's bedrooms marry dark jewel tones, soft lighting and warm wool-wood-velvet textures with a gig venue downstairs renowned for its comedy and live music programming. So you can work up a sweat at their ceilidhs or laugh till you ache at their regular comedy mixtape nights and then slide into a hot shower and then warm bed within minutes after. Category is: wholesome.
The Bedford, Balham
The Brook Green Hotel, Hammersmith
Pubs with rooms have to make some quite massive missteps to not feel warm and inviting, because there's something inherently cosy about the place where you eat, drink and make merry also being the place where you climb into bed: a house party, basically, but more civilised. But the Brook Green Hotel's in a different weight class yet to your average medium-cosy inn: wood-panelled bedrooms, thick, floor-to-ceiling curtains, big blankets, dog-friendly.
The Brook Green Hotel, Hammersmith
Batty Langley's, Spitalfields
Fireplaces, libraries, secluded terraces overlooking the rooftops and chimneys of Spitalfields: Batty Langley's is a gorgeously opulent 18th century country mansion poured into the body of a small boutique hotel, with a strong undertone of Hogwarts Dormitory to some of the rooms (Earl of Bolingbroke suite, we're looking at you).
Several of the rooms come with four poster beds for maximum shutting-the-winter-out, and if that weren't enough endorsement of your hibernation plans, the hotel's food offering is all supplied to your bedroom or suite (no restaurant on-site) so: very little need to ever wear clothes other than an occasional room-service-receiving dressing gown while you're staying here.
Batty Langley's, Spitalfields
