The Ritz London is a 5-starluxury hotel at 150 Piccadilly in London, England. A symbol of high society and luxury, the hotel is one of the world’s most prestigious and best known. 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.
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 231 feet (70 m) on the Piccadilly side, 115 feet (35 m) on the Arlington Street side, and 87 feet (27 m) 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. 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 famous “Tea at the Ritz”. It is an opulently decorated cream-coloured Louis XVI setting, 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 designerTessa Kennedy to resemble the bar on the Orient Express.
