From Pizza on the Park to £8,000-a-night hotel
A hotel where the cheapest room is £1,000-a-night and the dearest £8,000 is to be built at what was one of London's best-known jazz venues.
The Wellesley will have just 36 rooms — each with a dedicated butler service — including a suite occupying the entire top floor of the building when it opens in Knightsbridge in two years.
The basement previously housed Pizza on the Park, which closed in the summer after three decades featuring jazz greats such as George Melly, John Dankworth and Cleo Laine.
Khalid Affara, managing director of developers Arab Investments, said The Wellesley would be London's first "six-star" hotel. He said: "This will be to a better standard than all the five-star hotels in London. It will be like the first-class compartment of a plane, everyone will be the same sort of calibre of person."
The interiors are designed by Mary Fox Linton, whose past projects have included The Dorchester and a restoration of Eton College.
Features include a heated cigar terrace with Britain's largest humidor. There will also be a jazz bar to appease music lovers angered by the loss of the former venue.
The building, formerly offices but once the site of an abandoned Underground station, is being gutted in a £36&million scheme.
It is one of series of new boutique hotels aimed at wealthy visitors to London currently in the pipeline. Singapore hotel developer Kop Group is said to be on the brink of acquiring the Grade II-listed former Willis insurance headquarters on Trinity Square near the Tower of London for £70million.
