The Savoy was London’s first hotel specifically designed for luxury, raising the bar for comfort and service in a way that was unprecedented at the time

The Savoy is a global hotel legend. But, after a recent revitalisation, can it live up to its lofty reputation? LUX finds out

Glamour is a hard concept to pin down. Why are some people glamorous and others merely sexy? And what makes a hotel glamorous, rather than just impressive?

History helps, but not all historic luxury hotels are glamorous; some are faded, others reworked so their character is stripped out: too perfect.

The exterior of the hotel was crafted to resemble a chic waterside Continental hotel, with long rows of balconies along the River Front

The Savoy is glamorous. We weren’t quite sure it would be, having not been inside for years. It’s in a slightly curious location, perfect for London’s theatreland and Covent Garden, and famously overlooking the Thames, but not in the Mayfair/Knightsbridge hub.

But this is a hotel with heritage and society history written into it, as you notice when your taxi trundles up the driveway past the Savoy’s own theatre, on the right, and its celebrated Grill, on the left.

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The lobby area is so redolent of the roaring Twenties that you expect a jazz band to burst in at any moment. Up we went, in a tiny, period-chic lift, to a suite with a view across the Thames and out towards the lights of Canary Wharf – which of course didn’t exist for most of this hotel’s history. Despite the super-central location, there was no sound at all, the only traffic a stream of middle distance lights on Waterloo Bridge.

The Savoy hotel, built by Richard D’Oyly Carte, the creator of the Savoy Theatre, had a distinctly theatrical flair when it opened in 1889 – The décor was classically Victorian, but experienced changes since then

The American Bar is a Savoy legend, and the design and decor just ooze interwar chic – which is just as well, as some of the clients were dressed for a Sunday morning at a fast food restaurant. Should hotel bars have dress codes? Probably not, but onesies should certainly be banned. Glamour does need a certain filter.

The American Bar is the longest surviving cocktail bar and since 1893 has had guest from Winston Churchill to Ernest Hemingway

Fortunately, the staff and spectacle more than made up. Our server was charming, knowledgeable, passionate about his job, and professional – in the sense that working in the bar was his profession, in which he took pride, increasingly rare. The pianist was the pro you would expect, toning down the volume and singing so it didn’t overwhelm, but keeping everyones’ conversations moving along with his timing. Sip that perfect Negroni, gaze at the brilliant pianist, just don’t expect to see your fellow guests dressed like Audrey Hepburn.

Read more: La Fiermontina Family Collection, Lecce, Puglia review

The Savoy Grill was, back in the day, a place where Englishmen (always men) with starched collars and three piece suits would repair to for long lunches with their peers, who had been to the same boarding schools and worked in the same firms. It is a masterpiece of historic design, and you get there by sweeping across the (glamorous) lobby from the American Bar.

The Savoy river restaurant by Gordon Ramsay has views of the River Thames. There’s also an option of renting a private dining room for 8-12 guests, suitable for special events

And it’s quite an entrance. The Grill is now run by Gordon Ramsay, who has long done away with the men in three piece suits (they faded out of their own accord, apart from bizarre UK politician Jacob Rees-Mogg), and we were swept to our corner table by the hyper-professional staff.

Here at the Grill you see how a great restaurant is at the heart of the community of a great city. Tables surrounding us included a three-generation family celebration; people having a post-theatre dinner; a finance dude engaging in a very intense and thoughtful wine tasting of red Burgundies over his dinner; a couple who looked like they had materialised from everyone’s For You page on Instagram; two young women sipping champagne and talking about men; a lone woman in Dior who knew the staff as well as she knew her huge solitaire diamond ring.

The Savoy Grill by Gordon Ramsay serves a classic British and French-inspired menu from Beef Wellington, dry-aged beef to a Dover sole

We had Kir Royal Louet-Feissser oysters with blackberry and champagne – quite the combination – and a bright and highly defined yellowtail crude with English cucumber, dill and shisho, followed by an absolutely perfect olive crusted monkfish and moist and tender Beef Wellington, a nod to Savoy Grill tradition. Brilliant food but more importantly true dining experience.

And then a wander back across the now quiet lobby, up in the bijou lift, and to the room with the lights of London across the water. But the highlights were not over yet: the next morning, the Savoy served up perhaps the best in-room dining breakfast LUX has ever encountered.

Presentation was silver service and beautiful – perhaps a key quality of glamour – but the sourcing of the ingredients and cooking were extraordinary. Pancakes, each as thick as a finger, but with rich taste in their puffy interiors, rather than the oily exterior and sweet nothingness of so many; top quality avocado on fresh sourdough with a gentle sprinkle of chilli. Just beautiful – and glamorous to the last.

thesavoylondon.com

Teahpoo Bubble, 2 August 2017, Teahupoo, Tahiti, French Polynesia. © Ben Thouard

As Secretary-General of the Commonwealth of Nations, a central pillar of Patricia Scotland’s diplomatic work is to help the group of 56 Commonwealth countries – many with historical links to the UK – adapt to the impacts of climate change. It is an issue she knows all about

Scotland first became familiar with the effects of climate change in August 1979, when she was 24. In that month Hurricane David, a category 5 tropical storm, made landfall in her country of birth, Dominica, in the Caribbean. “It was one of the biggest category 5 hurricanes we’d seen,” she says. The damage was devastating: Dominica’s capital, Roseau, was described as “resembling an air raid”. Around three-quarters of Dominica’s population were made homeless and three-quarters of banana and coconut crops were destroyed.

“I remember it so graphically,” says Scotland. “My father, who was a very skilled carpenter-builder, left the UK and went to Dominica for months to help rebuild, because people had no houses and nowhere to stay. And it was a great shock.”

At the time, it was assumed that such severe storms would occur perhaps once a lifetime. But, owing to climate change, they may be becoming more frequent, as Scotland is only too aware, following two further disasters related to climate-change hazards. In August 2015, Tropical Storm Erika caused severe damage in Dominica and neighbouring countries. Then, in 2017, came Hurricane Maria.

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“It was the biggest hurricane the world had seen at that point,” remembers Scotland. Another category 5, Hurricane Maria encompassed the entire nation. “Everyone on the island was impacted,” she says. Dominica is thought of as a natural idyll with lush green vegetation, but when Scotland visited that year she barely recognised it. “Even the bark from the trees had been removed. I remember looking at one tree – it had one leaf and everything else was brown.” Decades of development, from bridges and schools to roads and houses, had been ripped from the ground and dumped in the sea.

Four decades on from her initial experience, the challenges, says Scotland, are to be ready for hurricanes and storms. “How can we build resilience while also mitigating the issue of climate change more broadly?” she asks. Today, these challenges, which also include encouraging financial institutions to step up and get creative, have become part of Scotland’s job.

Patricia Scotland was born in Dominica in 1955, moving at the age of two with her family to London, UK, where she still lives. In the 1970s she obtained a law degree and was called to the bar, and in 1991 she made history by becoming the first black woman appointed to be what was then a Queen’s Counsel (QC), marking her as an elite lawyer.

Later, in the 1990s, Scotland entered the UK government, holding a number of posts related to law and diplomacy, including a stint as Attorney General, the government’s most senior legal adviser. Her post came to an end in 2010, when the UK government changed. Then, in 2016, Baroness Scotland took up her current role as the sixth Secretary- General of the Commonwealth, a post she holds until 2024.

The Right Honourable Baroness Scotland

The Commonwealth is a voluntary association of countries, many of which were once part of the British Empire. Established following decolonisation to maintain the links between the countries, today there are 56 members. Commonwealth states are on the front lines of climate change, says Scotland.

Of the 56 countries, 33 are small states, and 25 of those are small island developing states. “We’d rather call them ‘big blue ocean states’,” she says. “Some of them have [marine] jurisdictions larger than the largest big land states.” These states are heavily exposed to sea-level rise and tropical cyclones, and many depend on marine ecosystems such as coral reefs – which are also threatened by climate change.

Extreme weather events such as hurricanes will keep happening, but, as Scotland points out, we can reduce the impacts if we take action. There are two major approaches to climate change, which go hand in hand: mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation means cutting greenhouse-gas emissions as much and as fast as possible, so the climate changes as little as possible. Alongside this, adaptation means helping countries and communities become resilient to the unavoidable impacts of climate change. Communities that have adapted suffer fewer deaths and less damage from extreme weather events, and recover more quickly and thoroughly. But adaptation costs money.

In 2009, developed countries promised to finance adaptation programmes in developing nations. They committed to provide $100 billion per year by 2020. “It was a bold recognition that this was necessary in order to assist those member states that had not contributed to the creation of the crisis,” says Scotland. “This was a real question of equity and fairness, because they were the ones who were going to have to adapt and mitigate a situation that they had not created.”

However, the promise was broken: even in 2023, annual adaptation funding is far short of $100 billion. “Although the world made that commitment, it didn’t actually identify how the $100 billion was going to be raised,” says Scotland. Worse, some governments were still contesting the reality of climate change. “That seems unreal now in 2023, but it was very real in 2009.”

And today, the adaptation bill has gone up, partly because of inflation, and partly because the delay has meant more urgency and more severe impacts. A 2021 UN Environment Programme report estimated just how much money is required annually for environmental projects, including adaptation. The bill comes to more than $500 billion per year. Other estimates are even higher. The bill for climate adaptation and other environmental needs will keep going up the more we delay, but there is a silver lining, says Scotland. Investing in adaptation reduces future costs and will enable the global economy to grow more. “This is a real invest-to-save,” she says.

The challenge is mobilising the money. It’s a multi-pronged challenge, but innovative financial strategies are a “really important” part of the solution, says Scotland. Several strategies have been proposed, and she says governments and funders should cast a wide net. “It’s not either-or, it’s all of them. People tend to say, ‘we’ll do this or we’ll do that’. It’s not ‘or’, it’s ‘and, and, and’.”

The Crack, 8 September 2017, Teahupoo, Tahiti, French Polynesia. © Ben Thouard

One useful form of finance is debt restructuring. Many developing countries have significant debts that reduce their ability to pay for new projects and make it harder for them to raise money from elsewhere. Countries like Dominica took out loans to pay for infrastructure, but when the hurricanes destroyed the infrastructure the government still had to pay the debts. “You still have that high level of indebtedness, but then you have to build back better [to become resilient],” says Scotland. “The costs are two or three times higher, but you’re burdened with the last debt with no relief.” This creates a “terrible cycle”.

To tackle this issue, multiple initiatives are helping countries manage or reduce their debt. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the G20 countries created a Debt Service Suspension Initiative. This relieved the debts of dozens of low-income countries, helping them to fight the pandemic, but it expired in December 2021. Meanwhile, the Commonwealth offers its member states a number of tools to manage their debts. The more that low-income countries can control their debts, the more money they will be able to raise for adaptation.

A related concept is a debt-for-nature swap. Here, a country has some of its debt written off, and, in exchange, the government commits to undertake environmental-protection initiatives, which can include climate adaptation. The Seychelles, a Commonwealth member, is a prominent success story. In the 2010s, the country set out to convert $21.6 million of its national debt into nature programmes. These included financing for climate adaptation by improving management of coasts, coral reefs and mangroves – all of which protect against tropical storms and rising seas, and provide other ecosystem services.The country also protected some of its waters.

Read more: Jean-Baptiste Jouffray on the future of the world’s oceans

Scotland says it’s essential to help countries obtain the climate money that is out there. “Most of the countries, unfortunately, that are most in need are least able to get access,” she says. Often they are told that they do not have enough empirical data to support their application, or that they haven’t followed arcane bureaucratic procedures. Scotland compares it to Waiting for Godot. In response, the Commonwealth has created a Climate Finance Access Hub, which provides expert advisers to help countries navigate the application processes. “We’ve already delivered into the hands of our small developing member states $70 million,” says Scotland. The pandemic caused delays, but more is coming. “We have over $420 million worth of projects in the pipeline.”

For Scotland, it’s creative and collaborative projects like these that will ensure countries adapt to climate change. “I believe we can do this,” she says. “This is a matter of choice.”

Perhaps it should be no surprise that an organisation like the Commonwealth, which has such a mix of countries among its members, is ahead of the curve on tackling climate change. Back in 1989, three years before the Rio Earth Summit, where countries agreed in principle to stop climate change, the Commonwealth issued the Langkawi Declaration on the Environment. The declaration highlighted “the serious deterioration in the environment” and called on governments to commit to “sustainable development”. More than three decades later, everyone else is catching on.

Find out more: thecommonwealth.org

This article was first published in the Deutsche Bank Supplement in the Spring/Summer 2023 issue of LUX

Bittescombe Lodge and Deer Park is situated on the edge of Exmoor National Park, surrounded by nature and tranquility

Hidden in the hills of Somerset lies Bittescombe lodge, now part of Mandarin Oriental’s exclusive homes collection in collaboration with StayOne. Candice Tucker visits the property and reports back

Mention the English countryside and it usually conjures up an image of gently rolling hills with a patchwork of fields separated by hedgerows, rather than the grandeur of the Scottish Highlands.

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Just 1 hour and 39 minutes away from London, by train, I discovered the best of both worlds. Nestling near Taunton, in Somerset, is Bittescombe Lodge and Deer Park. The short drive to the property provides spectaculars view of seemingly never ending hills, covered in a quilt of yellow and green to being surrounded by trees, which transports your imagination to the great Canadian forests.

The home’s interior design and artworks were all curated by the owner

The Lodge is located in a completely secluded part of Somerset, sitting on 400 acres of land. Inside the property is intricately designed to the most exacting detail with silk and wooden walls, eccentric coloured furniture and a variety of artworks, all curated by the owner, yet it still maintains an English countryside charm.

The living space which includes a full size snooker table and cinema screen

The amenities are endless from a cinema, indoor swimming pool and spa (including an in house masseuse) to a gym and paddle court. The owners have ensured that the instructors for all sports including shooting and clay pigeon shooting are of the highest calibre. We enjoyed sniper shooting (a plastic deer!) whilst sipping hot apple cider and bone broth soup prepared by the in-house Michelin Star, Mandarin Oriental approved chef. Alternatively, you might prefer to snuggle up with a good book sitting in the little library looking down at an indoor well that’s 15m deep.

Within the spa are a heated indoor swimming pool, jacuzzi, gym, sauna and massage room

Each bedroom is unique but all are luxurious and cosy. Our bedroom had a plush bright coloured headboard with wooden floors and thick rugs to sink your feet into. On the bed your name is embroidered onto your pillow case and even your hot water bottle! It’s these distinctive features that make the property feel like you are in your own luxurious home rather than simply a 5-star hotel.

With hidden doors in the walls it’s what you imagine your childhood self would dream about playing hide and seek in.

The service at the lodge is mirrored to that of Mandarin Oriental’s standards

At dinner we ate locally sourced venison from the deers reared at the estate. The owners explained that sustainability is an essential part of their ethos. At breakfast we could request whatever we desired. The hot danish pastries and soft poached eggs with ripe avocados on toasted sourdough was the ideal breakfast before a day in the outdoors.

Each bedroom is equipped with a fireplace and beautiful views of the estate

The trails around the estate echo the scenes enjoyed on the way to the Lodge, but then you hit the deer park. With over 150 deer roaming free around the park one becomes enchanted by families of deer gracefully bounding across the land or stopping to drink at a meandering stream.

Read more: Edgewood Resort, Lake Tahoe Review

With up to ten rooms available, we recommend the stay for group trips. If you demand the full grand British countryside experience, Bittescombe Lodge and Deer Park provides it.

Rates: From £20,880/2-nights (approx. €23,500/$25,000)

Book your stay: www.stayone.com/mandarin-oriental-exclusive-homes/bittescombe-lodge

ionic cars makes over classic cars with high performance, zero-emissions electric power

LUX discovers how UK start-up ionic cars is replacing the original engines of classic cars with zero-emission electric power

According to government figures, cars currently account for just over 18% of UK emissions. Aiming towards the goal of cutting emissions to net zero by 2050, there have been dramatic shifts towards the production of electric cars with Mini, the Vauxhall Corsa and the Fiat 500 most recently launching electric models. For classic car lovers, however, eco-friendly options are hard to come by, which is where ionic cars comes in.

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The bodywork is refurbished and interiors are fully customisable

The UK-based start-up transforms vintage cars by removing the original high emissions ‘old-tech’ engines and replacing them with zero-emission power. The bodywork is fully refurbished and interiors are customisable with everything from vegan leather to heated seats and matching luggage. For those worrying about the car’s collectible value, the process is fully reversible, or the original engine can be refashioned into a bespoke perspex case coffee table. ionic’s models currently include the Mercedes-Benz Pagoda and Porsche 911 with plans to expand in the future.

For more information visit: ioniccars.com