One London hotel has gone all brilliantly weird for Christmas.
From a distance, the Connaught's 9.5 metre Christmas tree is stylishly minimalist, as you'd expect from a posh Mayfair establishment.
Get up close, though, and it's like something from a Doctor Who Christmas special. Dozens of human faces peer out from the tree's baubles, trapped in crystal prisons like a festive General Zod (to mix our science-fantasy franchises).
It gets even weirder. We learn from the label that none of these people really exist. They're all AI generated. You can normally tell from the number of fingers, but here we see only their grinning faces, backlit with LEDs.
We can't decide if it's (a) brilliant, (b) terrifying, (c) a little bit naff, (d) all of the above... but it *is* refreshing to see a bit of originality in the yuletide decorations.
Looking into it, the tree was designed by "influential Swiss-born contemporary visual artist Urs Fischer", and reckons to be a "luminous celebration of togetherness". And we have to applaud the artist's attitude:
My dream is always the same: that my work communicates enough by itself, without too much context, that people who don't engage with art get something out of it. That's a really gratifying experience, to have someone just see something and think, wow, that's cool, and they're not from within the art world. Christmas is a time to celebrate together, and this years design is a collective of characters doing exactly that, having a good time.
Too many artist interventions are off-putting — even to art critics — because of the wanky descriptions that accompany them. To be told that this is just a tree with some grinning happy faces is soooo welcome. More of this please!
The Connaught Hotel is in Carlos Place, just west of Berkeley Square. The tree will be up until the first week of January 2026.
