London Hotels: Sanctum Soho

THERE were broken beer bottles in Warwick Street on Monday morning. Normally, we’d put that down to rowdy Sunday nighters. But seeing as the bottles were just a couple of metres from London’s newest hotel, the Sanctum Soho, we’d like to think they were lobbed from an upstairs window.

With a “guitar doctor” on call 24 hours a day, wardrobe-free “crashpad” rooms designed for those, er, unplanned overnighters, and an owner, Mark Fuller, who used to be a band manager touring with the likes of Thin Lizzy before he bought the Embassy Club (not to mention backing from Iron Maiden managers Andy Taylor and Rod Smallwood), the Sanctum has billed itself as London’s first rock’n’roll hotel. No wonder Ozzy Osbourne and Lily Allen have been making inquiries already – and it doesn’t even open until Friday.

At first, we thought it must be a PR gimmick. When Fuller made a quip about filling baths with Jack Daniel’s, it was like he was throwing down the gauntlet to London’s other new hotel, the Bermondsey Square, which was hyping up its room-service pillow fights. But that was just a comment on its service, says the hotel’s Kate McKenzie.

“It just means that if someone asks for a bath to be filled with JD, we’ll see how soon we can get it done rather than asking why.”

Given that bottles of Jack in the minibar cost £56 for just 37.5cl, it’s probably not something that most guests will be gunning for, anyway.

Fuller’s crew has spent £10m on a mere 30 rooms in the six-floor, Grade II-listed building on Warwick Street – one of the rat-runs going parallel to Regent Street.

On the roof is a 24-hour bar (for hotel guests only) and, for afters, a Jacuzzi to fit eight. In the basement will be – from May – a cinema. Rumour has it it’ll screen films like the Biggie Smalls biopic Notorious; the hotel says guests will be able to play on their Wiis down there on the big screen (there’s one in every room).

What are the rooms actually like? Overtly sexy, albeit in a knows-it way. It’s kind of the Liz Hurley of the hotel scene, only with sparkly walls instead of safety pins – everything’s exquisitely done, and because you know you’re meant to find it sexy, you do.

All have a wetroom rather than a bathroom (though that’s probably for the name as much as anything else); some have a black sink and toilet, like the equally

rock-star Hotel on Rivington in New York.

There are six different colour schemes – suites are silvery, while rooms range from ultra-feminine – cream, embossed wallpaper,

pink-tinged carpet and rampantly girly carved beds – to full-on sex dens, with walls covered in lurexy fabric and shimmery gravel. Even the bins are tiger print, and the minibars are stocked with maxi-size booze – tequila by the half-litre (£80) and Piper Heidsieck by the half-bottle (£28). It’s not for those averse to excess. Luckily the TVs are attached to the walls, so hurling them out the windows would require a lot of effort.

Hopefully, any trashing antics from the neighbours won’t be a problem – friends of the management who’ve been roadtesting the hotel for niggles over the past few weeks have asked for extra soundproofing, which will be installed by Friday.

And it’s not quite as rock’n’roll as you might think – interconnecting doors between some of the rooms are designed for families rather than anything of a Primrose Hill bent.

So by Friday, the only performance anxiety you should get is from imagining what everyone else is up to in their crashpads.

The hotel’s operating a soft opening period until the end of May – so crashpads cost as little as £125 a night. After that, they shoot up to £175, plus VAT and breakfast. So if you’re hoping to save money for that bath of Jack, best get in there now.