Edwin Lutyens designed the Midland Bank headquarters on Poultry in the City of London between 1924 and 1939 — one of the most authoritative Edwardian Baroque facades in the capital, its Portland stone colonnades and rusticated arches carrying the full weight of institutional confidence. When Soho House and Sydell Group converted it into The Ned in 2017, the challenge was not to overwhelm that gravitas but to animate it, filling eight floors and 252 rooms with a layered accumulation of period atmosphere that feels more like a private members' club that happened to grow a hotel than a hospitality project working backward from a concept. The interiors, handled by the Soho House design team under Nick Jones, lean into an Edwardian-to-1930s continuum rather than committing to a single moment. Rooms mix iron bedsteads and Morris-adjacent floral wallpapers with fringed lamps and Persian rugs, the effect somewhere between a well-appointed London townhouse and a transatlantic liner cabin. The ground-floor banking hall, preserved in its cathedral-scaled entirety, holds nine restaurants and bars carved from the original vaulted space — among them the Electric Bar, with its green-tiled counter, brass fittings, and neon signage that pitches deliberately between nostalgia and theatre. Darker dining rooms lined in jewel-toned velvet banquettes and floral wallpaper press further into that mood, the lacquered ceilings reflecting fringe-shaded pendants back across gold-topped tables.

No travel notes provided yet.

No description provided yet.