The OWO Whitehall, Residents’ Lounge. Image courtesy of Grain London

London’s hottest luxury residential area? Westminster, next to the Houses of Parliament and Downing Street. So what took it so long, asks Samantha Welsh

Big Ben, Downing Street, Whitehall, Parliament Square, Trafalgar Square: all names intimately associated with London, and now the administrative and touristic heart of the world’s high net worth capital. The area, broadly known as Westminster, is (pandemic excepted) the epicentre of tourism in Britain.

The OWO Whitehall, principal bedroom. Image courtesy of Grain London

And now you can live in high style down the road from the Prime Minister and the royals, with the creation of one of the most opulent residential developments in the world, inside the heart of the area’s grand buildings.

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The Old War Office (OWO), in Whitehall – opposite Horse Guards Parade and almost directly opposite Downing Street, and so near to the Prime Minister’s residence that you could shout from rooftop to rooftop to see if you could borrow some milk (or champagne for a lockdown party) – has been transformed into 85 apartments.

The OWO residence turret. Image courtesy of Grain London

They are serviced by Raffles, the appropriately peripatetic luxury hotel brand now owned by the French Accor group. A new Raffles hotel, London’s first, is opening next-door and residents will have a full suite of luxury services. The building’s redevelopment has been done with thought: the best of British material and design, along with other high-end touches, like bespoke appliances by the German manufacturer Gaggenau.

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Residents will have priority access to 11 restaurants and 3,000sqm of leisure facilities, gardens and terraces. The building’s heritage has been conserved in partnership with Historic England, with design overseen by Thierry Despont. As an OWO resident your local chiming clock is Big Ben.

The OWO residence entrance hall. Image courtesy of Grain London

This is the building from which Winston Churchill directed efforts in the Second World War of what was then the British Empire. The apartments now are suitably imperial, but have a contemporary smoothness. On your Sunday morning strolls in St James’ Park (assuming you haven’t decamped to your weekend home in the Cotswolds or Ramatuelle) you will bump into the Prime Minister, and numerous spies – the important ones are there on Sundays. Arguably the best school in the world, Westminster, is along the road. And if you need to lobby the government, you can just lean out of the window, while puffing on your Romeo y Julieta and sipping a glass of Pol Roger, Winston Churchill-style.

Find out more: theowo.london

This article appears in the Summer 2022 issue of LUX

St. James’s Hotel and Club is tucked into a quiet corner of Mayfair

London might seem spoilt for hotels, but if you’re looking for small-scale, intimate luxury it’s not so easy to find – especially in Central. This is where St. James’s Hotel and Club comes in with a Michelin-starred restaurant and hands-on masterclasses

Tucked in a quiet residential street on the edge of Green Park, almost directly behind The Ritz, St. James’s Hotel and Club benefits from proximity to Piccadilly and Regent’s Street, whilst also offering a sense of relative seclusion. The building itself was originally a members’ club for travelling diplomats, founded in 1857 by English aristocrat and the Sardinian minister. It played host to the likes of Winston Churchill, Henry James and Ian Fleming, among others, until it closed in the 1970s. In 1980, the doors were reopened by Peter de Savary (owner of The Cary Arms in Devon) as a hotel and a club. Now owned by German hotel group Althoff, the hotel has been refurbished with contemporary touches, whilst still preserving a sense old-world charm.

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Our room is the Westminster Suite on the seventh floor. The ambience leans slightly towards the corporate side, but it’s elegantly furnished and features a private terrace, large enough to host a cocktail party. On a less drizzly evening than ours, it would be a very pleasant place for a warming glass of mulled wine whilst admiring the rooftop views. As it is, we have a chocolate masterclass to get attend.

Rooms are decorated with elegant, contemporary furnishings

The Westminster Suite’s private terrace

The masterclass is just one of the hotel’s offerings for guests, alongside cheese and wine pairing, and cocktail mixing. Our class is held in a smart basement meeting room and is led by the convivial pastry chef, who shows us how to make and roll truffles whist we sip on glasses of champagne. The class, unlike those at many five-star hotels, is very hands-on, and whilst our truffles come out oddly shaped (some collapsing completely) it’s a lot more fun making than watching. Better yet, our truffles are whisked away to solidify and then returned to our room in ribbon tied bags with a kit containing ingredients and recipes so that we can make more at home. White chocolate passion fruit truffles are a revelation.

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The hotel offers a series of masterclasses including chocolate truffle making with the restaurant’s pastry chef

Pre-dinner drinks are served in William’s Bar and Bistro – a cosy and eccentric cocktail bar with a particularly impressive collection of paintings. These are part of the Rosenstein Collection, which includes more than 450 artworks in total, many of which are portraits and can be found dotted around the hotel. We thoroughly enjoy discussing the work whilst sipping cocktails and nibbling on British tapas plates. Guests can also dine here if they choose.

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Tonight, though, we have a table booked at the hotel’s Michelin-starred Seven Park Place restaurant. The dining room is comprised of only a handful of tables tucked into a curved room with elaborately patterned walls and soft velvet seats. The menu – here and in the bar – is overseen by Head Chef William Drabble with a focus on the best of British produce which means seasonal plates and locally sourced ingredients. During our stay, the emphasis is on fresh fish and seafood, which, as pescetarian diners, suits us perfectly. Our favourites include the poached lobster tail with a buttery truffle sauce, and the seabass with braised Jerusalem artichokes, wild mushrooms and a red wine and tarragon sauce. Since the wine menu is nearly fifty pages long, we’re more than grateful for the sommelier’s assistance who pairs our courses perfectly to suit our individual tastes.

The service, in general, is friendly and relaxed, which makes for a very welcoming atmosphere. It’s perhaps not the most family-orientated hotel as noise levels are kept to a low hum, and the property itself is small, but for a luxurious city-break or staycation, it ticks all the boxes.

Book your stay: stjameshotelandclub.com

Note: Seven Park Place restaurant closed for refurbishment after our stay, but has recently reopened with a new look. For more information visit: stjameshotelandclub.com/en/restaurant-seven-park-place

Portrait of a Berber woman by Ghizlan El Glaoui

Moroccan artist Ghizlan El Glaoui, daughter of renowned painter Hassan El Glaoui and granddaughter of Thami El Glaoui, the last Pasha of Marrakech, is fascinated with faces and finding beauty in the world. Editor-in-Chief Darius Sanai speaks to the artist about her artistic childhood, African art and her portrait wish-list.

Ghizlan El Glaoui at work in the studio

Darius Sanai: How long have you been living and working in London?
Ghizlan El Glaoui: It’s been 21 years now. I studied and married in Paris and then decided to move to England due to a job offer for my husband. I’ve been here ever since – I like London and was so happy to move away from France. I am half French, but lived in Morocco for most of my life so the French was still foreign to me – even though I had a French mother. When I was in Paris, I suddenly realised that my French side of my personality was not as developed as I thought. I always felt like a foreigner to the Parisians. By experiencing Paris, I always loved people from the South and that the people from the North were very different, so I remained big friends with the South of France. But when I moved to London, I just thought, this is it.

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DS: You come from a great artistic heritage and you are both an artist and a collector, how has that developed? When did you start doing what and how did it all start?
GEG: I had an artistic father and grandfather. I was always surrounded by their art, influences and admiration of arts. I grew up with these passions. I became my father’s muse, posing for his portraits. My father was my first tutor and he knew of such amazing artists himself that I had 4-5 tutors in the room while watching him paint. You have to watch a lot when you’re posing there is nothing else to do, you can’t move, so I observed the way he was looking at me and all the other things around it as well. I have kept this passion of portraiture and so I started to have this need to express myself through artistic means. I was a pianist as well so I suppose it was evident that I had this ability with arts in general. This is why I wanted to study art in general in Paris. The academy I went to taught you art, but also prepared you for finding a job afterwards. Half of it was very intense art courses and the other half was learning how to make a magazine, learning about typography.

DS: When you were a student, did you think you would become an artist or was it just a passion?
GEG: It’s difficult to say. I was never really good at doing what I was asked to do, but what is interesting is that the project we had to do in our last year was about mosaic. We had to take an image and reproduce it on a much bigger scale. We had to cut the pain ourselves, into squares, and had to recreate that mosaic with different tones. I remember very well that I chose an incredibly good-looking model that was posing at the time for all the Armani perfume campaigns. His face was absolutely gorgeous! Since then I have readapted this technique to my own, now I don’t cut the squares, I paint them directly onto the linen.

I painted more after having kids, when I had the time to develop my artistic career. It has been a passion and a hobby for many years and only when my girls started going to school did I have the time to further develop the presence of my art in London, which I hadn’t done before. I was very present in St Tropez and other places where my name perhaps had more meaning. After Morocco, Madrid and other places, I thought London would be a good place. At the time, London was very British orientated in terms of art, focussing on British artists. As a foreigner, it was quite a trick to get into the English art world, so I didn’t want to try until I had proven myself in other places before. More recently, my sister opened the 154 African Art fair which has been hugely successful, so there clearly is international demand for top African artists.

DS: African art is a very broad definition, is that how you define yourself?
GEG: Not at all. I paint beauty, that’s how I define it. On the subject of African art, the King of Morocco is trying his best to create an Africa where Morocco is included. I think Morocco is very different to other places in Africa. It has so much history and culture. I think it’s a very special place and should remain as such. Everybody wants to collect African art now, my sister started it, and at the time nobody wanted to go to her first show. Now, the trend is so big that even Sotheby’s and Christie’s are telling you about their African collections that apparently they have had for years, but never showed. Suddenly they are all becoming experts! Obviously, it is incredibly important to show art from African artists, as it should be seen by everyone around the world.

Blue Blossom by Ghizlan El Glaoui

DS: Do you define yourself as Moroccan or a school of Moroccan art? Is that more accurate?
GEG: I would say, my father always had a fight with the school of Moroccan art, because they never gave him the credit of Moroccan art. They always got jealous, as he was in Paris and had incredible links and connections with artists, even before he was 30. They never considered him as an official part of the Moroccan trend of artists. They put him aside and excluded him in exhibitions in the past. They were very worried that my father has a special position. I do think he deserved it and he did have it. He’s been so successful and has been so incredibly grateful to his country – making it shine all over the world – he’s done that through his talent. To watch him and his career at this stage, I can only be very proud.

Darius Sanai: Would you put yourself in the same category?
Ghizlan El Glaoui: I cannot. I have his art on my walls! I think the big force of my father was that he was so modest. He never believed a painting was finished and he never wanted to sell his art – he was very shy of being in the limelight.

DS: How do you artistic styles compare?
GEG: I took all the positive things that I had learned from my dad and my method has been the same since art school. I paint the same square method and my technique, which is from art school onwards, is to paint on the other side of the canvas, because I don’t like white – it does not inspire me. This comes from my dad as well, his teacher would always prepare the back of the painting before she decided what she was going to paint on it. She would use all the old tubes and palettes to create the next painting, so she wouldn’t waste any paint – everything would be used. We have a cat at the house, which everybody loved. The teacher created a grey background and then she decided to put that cat on it, it looked so incredible! It stayed with me that you have to prepare your background before you paint it.

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Many years later, I discovered the light for the background of my paintings – day light, night light, because I wanted my paintings to show different faces. I then realised I could put lights behind it and achieve as many faces as I wanted – not just day and night by this incredible engineering of light. I was also always really fascinated by mosaics in churches and how the light would come through the glasses. I think my artistic style represents who I am and where I come from, it stands for everything I like which I’ve melted together. My technique is based of all my inspirations, melted together and I’m always trying to represent beauty. I think there are so many horrors in the world that we now live in, so it is the artist’s job to bring joy and pleasure. I’m not an artist who destroys beauty – I’m not Picasso. There are so many perfections, to me, in the world. I need to make everything beautiful. This is what I do when I tackle a project. Right now I’m doing a series on Indians in America and make them shine again – giving them their moment, because we always forget how we built our new world; it was by destroying another race. I want them to shine again with their culture, their beautiful costumes, their attitudes, their pride – so many things I admire from this population.

Portrait of Berber woman by Ghizlan El Glaoui

DS:  Where do you take inspiration? Where do you get your ideas from?
GEG: That’s a very good question. I have waiting lists in my mind of people I plan to paint one day. Some days I think about the news and that will make someone move up in the list. Sometimes I look at my past work to maybe develop those ideas. I have a friend who works at Dior now, so I’d like to look at this vintage fashion dresses from Dior – that could be an interesting project to work on. My ideas come from lots of different things. Charlie Chaplin is on my list. I haven’t done many men yet. I’d also like to paint Winston Churchill with his cigar.

DS: You mention beauty, is this very important for your art?
GEG: Yes, I have a big sense of aesthetic beauty. My mother thought we were all muses of Botticelli and her passion of art, I think, influenced her children – we even looked like Botticelli models with the same type of hair. I think my interest is a combination of my mum’s aesthetic and my dad’s aesthetic. My need for beauty is from my childhood. There were also beautiful mosaics everywhere in our buildings, my mum had a big collection of furniture so I was lucky enough to always be surrounded by lovely things and I want to reproduce this beauty.

DS: And what are you most excited about creating for next year?
GEG: I would like to do a beautiful exhibition of Berber ladies from the south of my country, Morocco.

ghizlanelglaoui.com