The Zetter Bloomsbury: antiques roadshow, but make it Soho House

Bloomsbury is lovely this time of year, isn’t it? The sun seeps through the trees that line the avenues around the British Museum, bright young things flock to Lamb’s Conduit Street for wine and tailoring and locals and tourists mingle, for the most part in peace, as the days draw longer and longer. It will be summer soon.

The neighbourhood also has the rare distinction of catering to both the traveller and the resident. The local hotels, historically geared to the former, are beginning to play a similar double act. There has long been an unspoken divide between the southern end of Bloomsbury — bordering Holborn — and its northern end, bordering King’s Cross: younger, trendier and somewhere people actually live. The Zetter Townhouse, a new property that sits in Bloomsbury's southern hemisphere, may finally be changing that.

As is the mark of any fine boutique hotel, you could easily walk past the Zetter without realising it is there. I know this because I did so, twice, while searching for signage after an event with the Red Squirrel Survival Trust. I was due to have dinner there with James Thurstan Waterworth, the superstar designer whose past clients include Ronnie Scott’s and Soho House, and who led the Zetter’s four-year renovation project. He is also the man behind Thurstan, a design studio in Clerkenwell (the title is a nod to his middle name).

I find James in the dining room dotted around by lamps, busts and vases (from Africa, Oceania, et al) as well as more quixotic pieces like a miniature ukulele. There is a painting that sits somewhere between a green and a blue, on whose chromatic identity no one can quite agree. The designer holds court over dinner surrounded by an enamoured press (besides being talented, James is compellingly good-looking). And so to the new Zetter, of which much the same can be said, and where a thousand antiques are strewn across all bedrooms and common areas. The building, I am told, was designed to evoke the home of a well-travelled friend. Everywhere are reminders of trips to far-flung corners of the Earth: trinkets and artefacts are carefully arranged so as to feel in dialogue with each other, rather than obliquely juxtaposed.

Every piece has been acquired in much the same way as one might buy a holiday souvenir, James explains, serving as a memento more than an actual symbol of anything. It is a decor that merely hints at erudition without ever falling for the didactic; where stylistic choices are guided not by meaning, but — in a manner reminiscent of Bloomsbury’s status as a fin-de-siècle icon — by beauty. With this new property, the Zetter Group continues to cement its hold over central London: the Bloomsbury townhouse is their third opening in the last 20-odd years, joining properties in Clerkenwell and Marylebone.

The building is made up not of one but six Georgian properties, vestiges of a golden age that have been knocked together to create a quiet grande dame. There are 68 rooms in total, although the hotel feels nowhere near as big — a good thing. The lighting, sly and seductive, contributes to an overall feeling of cosiness. The location, at the back of the British Museum, elucidates some of the more out-there design choices. What has been derided, in recent years, as a largely looted national collection — many of the museum’s notable items, such as the Elgin Marbles, are cobbled from Ancient sites — works rather well here, the moodiness of the setting conferring upon the artwork a more intimate, perhaps devotional feel.

The Zetter’s strength, as a hospitality brand, is evidenced in the time it takes to build its portfolio. It waits for the right set of properties to come up for restoration and ensures that all artistic choices are considered and unhurried. Bringing in Soho House’s former European design director for this particular project has paid off. Speaking to Country Life in 2025, James cited Axel Vervoordt and Robert Kime as his aesthetic heroes: men whose seamless blending of the old and new have left an indelible imprint on the young designer and whose relationship to antique collecting showed no temporal or geographical boundaries. (Still the case for Axel.)

In the same interview, James expressed a love for the artist Roger Hilton. ‘It’s very basic,’ the designer said — an accusation sometimes leveled against Soho House by its detractors — yet his decisions suggest, at every turn, that he is marching to the beat of his own drum. The artefacts at Zetter, while varied, are singular — the pick-and-mix of a trained eye who refuses to subscribe to common denominators. Everything about the Zetter, moreover, feels uninvasive, as though this really is one's pied-à-terre while there. Guests move about the place freely, with glass doors leading seamlessly from the orangery into the garden. The wait staff is discrete, and the bar staff efficient.

Dinner runs like clockwork. Our pudding, a chocolate and salted caramel torte served with hazelnut, amoretti and vanilla ice cream, is an ideal palette cleanser after our exceptional medley of chicken, artichoke and morel. It is time to retreat upstairs. The strength of a hotel, naturally, must be judged first and foremost on its rooms. Are these enough of a blank canvas that one can leave their mark simply by hanging their clothes in the wardrobe or leaving their toiletries in the bathroom? Yet not so impersonal as to feel alienating when one’s usual creature comforts are nowhere to be found?

It’s a fine balance — one the Zetter strikes with ease. Each room is entirely unique: some boast mustard-coloured walls, others four-poster beds, and in the odd case, a freestanding bath. Sash windows are painted cream and gaze out onto the street or onto the courtyard, depending on which side of the corridor one enters the room from. If booking, ask for one with a courtyard view. They gaze out onto the British Museum and on the west-facing light at sunset.

A mounted fabric of blue indigo, produced by the Mossi Tribe of Burkina Faso, hangs above my desk (the Zetter knows its clientele can be the busy kind), lending a touch of drama to an otherwise warm bedroom. Mattresses, meanwhile, are from Royal Warrant-holder Hypnos, so comfortable one falls asleep in under ten minutes. The bathroom is modern and practical: a shower head disappears into the ceiling just as overhead lighting would ordinarily, although you’ll find none of the latter here. The handle of the smaller shower spray is appended somewhat annoyingly close to the body; a slender man myself, I kept bashing into it.

There is an obvious reputational risk for any hotel set within walking distance of King’s Cross: how to avoid being seen as somewhere visitors merely pass through, even if they do pay their dues? The Zetter has risen to the challenge in much the same way as The Goring, one of London’s grande dame hotels a stone’s throw from Victoria Station. That is, as Voltaire decreed, by cultivating one’s jardin. The Zetter's garden holds both a terrace and an enviably mowed lawn (crucial, as the summer months creep in), which themselves serve as extensions of the orangery: a paean to the early 20th-century explorer-collector and, no doubt, the room in which James’s vision comes alive the most.

Hand-stitched cushions, red whicker armchairs and a rich assembly of plants envelop the dining tables, as the sun beats down from an ample roof light. The blinds recall those you might find on safari and the whole thing smells faintly of cedar. ‘I collect 20th century British abstract art — 1950s-70s — very much the British-St Ives ilk,’ James once told Country Life. The Zetter fizzes with the same kind of mid-century energy that London's new hotels tend to lack. I'll certainly be coming back.

Rooms at The Zetter Bloomsbury start from £400 a night, without breakfast. Visit the hotel's website for more information and to book.