Hanover Square had not gained a new hotel in over a decade when Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners chose it as the site for what became one of London's more structurally audacious recent builds. The Mandarin Oriental Mayfair, which arrived in 2024, is held together by a Vierendeel structural frame — a column-free system that transfers loads through rigid rectangular cells rather than diagonal bracing, and one of the first vertical deployments of that technique in the UK. From the street, that engineering ambition is dressed in handmade elongated red-brick baguettes that quietly converse with the Georgian terraces lining the square, the facade warm and measured rather than assertive. A sculptural ring fountain anchors the entrance forecourt, providing a moment of pause before the building draws you inside. The fifty guest rooms and suites were handed to Studio Indigo, whose instinct here runs toward a cultivated softness — boucle sofas, hand-painted blossom murals in both dusty mauve and porcelain blue, biomorphic marble coffee tables on brass legs, and a knotted gold pendant of considerable scale overhead. Curiosity, the Tokyo-based studio, shaped the public spaces, and their restaurant carries a different register entirely: layered cedar panelling, copper ribbon installations cascading above tan leather banquettes, and a large-format ink-wash painting anchoring the far wall. Below ground, the spa pool is lined in dark granite mosaic, its polished columns catching the amber underglow of recessed capsule lights — calm, ceremonial, and entirely removed from the Mayfair street above.

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