‘I helped decorate the Savoy for Christmas – here are the insider tips I learnt’
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It’s 11pm on a Saturday in mid-November and I’m standing in the Savoy’s lobby in my jolliest Christmas jumper and The Nutcracker March playing full-blast in my head. You see, I’m channelling Will Ferrell’s Buddy in the movie Elf because I’ve offered to join the Savoy’s team of nearly 50 “elves”, among them florists, set designers, carpenters, electricians, scaffolders and specialist tree decorators, all set to work through till 8am in order to transform the five-star hotel into a festive fantasy.
Along with decorating a 15ft Christmas tree in the Art Deco lobby, we’ll also be installing a smoke-puffing replica steam engine with a velvet-lined champagne booth, a sleigh towing a gravity-defying cascade of presents, and a Victorian winterscape of frosted trees and old-fashioned lamp posts, as well as some 25 other Christmas trees around the hotel.
“Years ago, we just had a tree in the corner,” the in-house carpenter John tells me. But in the era of social media, that no longer passes muster, adds the Savoy’s head florist Belinda Bowles, who is overseeing its “festive activation”. Every year, “there’s a pressure to be bigger and better”, she explains. Christmas is, “by a long, long way”, the toughest, most important moment of her year, with planning starting back in April: “It’s the only night shift we do, and this year the bar feels higher.” There is, predictably, “big-time” rivalry among London’s grande-dame hotels – also Claridge’s, The Ritz and the Dorchester. “We all look at each other,” says Bowles, “even if we say we don’t.”
Unsurprisingly, the atmosphere is tense. The hotel is currently “bursting at the seams”, says Bowles (including three families – “regulars” – wanting to wake up to the festivities at 6am), plus 300 revellers in the ballroom, not due to leave until 1am (which therefore requires a slow, “discreet” start to decoration), and protests on the streets delaying the many trucks delivering kit and crews.
First in is The Christmas Company, suppliers of that 15ft tree, which requires six of its 16-strong team (all black-clad, like stagehands) to pull it into the hotel on a trolley; the others bring in plastic crates packed with fairy lights, baubles, bows and faux flowers. I rush out to the trucks and offer to carry a six-foot tree over my shoulder: they politely decline. Trailing in empty-handed, I spot my first five-star decorating hack: if your tree is taller than your ladder, it’s easier and safer to decorate the top of it while it’s still horizontal (lights first, always).
Once most of the jewellery-jangling guests have zigzagged out of the hotel, the tree is hoisted into position. Hooking a sack of baubles onto his ladder, The Christmas Company co-founder Matt Davies expertly adorns the tree, and then, through clenched smiles, the team agrees to let me have a go. It’s not long, however, before I sense a frostiness in the air: “Are you done yet?” someone asks tetchily. Feeling like a meddling toddler, I watch my glittery baubles being swiftly removed. I leave the team to their creative vision, with Davies calling out, “More splashy! More splashes of white!” By 2am the tree is complete.
Bowles, meanwhile, is setting up Santa’s sleigh outside the hotel’s Gucci boutique, so I offer my assistance. Not right now, thank you: “There’ll be stuff to do around 4am,” she promises. “That’s when the creativity happens.” Resigning myself temporarily to an observational role, I head to the glass-domed tea room, where Event Trees (who recently installed Winter Wonderland’s frontage) is festooning the room and marble staircase with 168 white-painted branches covered with glittering, “snow-dusted” leaves, and a kilometre of fairy lights.
My new hands-off vantage point has its uses in terms of spotting festive hacks. Almost everything is secured with cable-ties: “I don’t know what we’d do without them,” says Bowles. As I poke a finger into a surprisingly squishy branch, I realise they’re not wooden but foam. The foam trunks are held in place with piles of weights, prettily concealed with abundant clusters of faux ferns. “Abundance is key,” one installer explains. More is most definitely more – indeed, what you really need (as well as a Savoy-league budget) is a “scaff tower” in order to achieve height and maximum visual impact. “Basically, you keep on adding until you go, ‘Yeah’,” explains Event Trees’ director Richard Moore.
Doing nothing, meanwhile, turns out to be exhausting – I am the only one yawning. And I’m ravenous – before the all-nighter, Bowles warned me we wouldn’t stop to eat: “We’re too busy.” Trying to stay upright, I head to the American bar where four florists are garlanding its mirrors. Bows, they explain, add glamour and are useful for filling gaps – for extra oomph, they use wired ribbon and double up the bows, one on top of another. And when lighting a tree, always run your cables up and down, not round and round, pushing the lights into the branches to avoid creating straight lines.
At 4am I gingerly return to Bowles: “Anything I can do?” I ask, above the clamour of drills. “Ah, sorry,” she replies. “We’re at the critical bit now.” I turn into the Reading Room and chance upon a platter of home-baked biscuits and an inviting sofa. I somehow lose an hour.
I come round to the now-familiar sound of the train’s bell and go to see how it’s coming along. A triumph of repurposing, it was built in 12 weeks from laughing gas canisters (literally “from the gutter”, its creator Dave Anderson from the Giant Snow Globe company tells me), coffee-machine parts, baking trays, brass curtain finials, Ford Focus suspension springs, and an old school bell. Too big to get through the Savoy’s doors in one piece, its various sections are now being assembled by Anderson.
As sunrise approaches, tensions mount. At 6am, the drinks sponsor arrives, delivering rose-coloured monogrammed blankets and cushions for the steam engine’s champagne carriage, predictably grumbling that there isn’t enough branding. The first guests appear, awestruck by the installations: “It’s literally smothered!” So is the floor, as a growing army of cleaners battle the tide of glitter, foliage and cable ties.
“It’s taking a little longer than expected,” apologises the PR. This is Parkinson’s law, observes Moore – ie, the time required to complete a task expands into the time available. “Humans are not very good at getting things done in a time frame.” From 7am, breakfast guests trickle in: “Oh, so cute!” one exclaims. But it’s when the crew start taking selfies against their installations that it’s obvious it’s coming together.
At 8am, Bowles invites me outside – John is up on the roof testing the snow cannons that operate during Advent. Not only that, the ‘O’ of the Savoy sign is wearing a neon Santa’s hat, the Lalique poissons fountain sculpture is encased in a 15ft artificial tree, and in among a dozen more trees are baubles the size of space hoppers, 78 gold gift boxes and thousands more fairy lights.
Yet there’s still more to do, says Bowles. All of the real trees, she explains, including the main one, will be replaced twice – twice – in more overnight missions this season. There is, she says, one top London hotel “that will remain unnamed” that doesn’t change its trees. “It’s just cringe – it can’t not be perfect for Christmas Day.”
