Hotel Hit Squad: Inside the Southampton Harbour Hotel – still riding the crest of a wave one year on
I’m drawn to structures built to resemble boats, but which obviously aren’t. When spread over several storeys, they have the same kind of infantile appeal as a racing-car bed, but realised on an infinitely more lavish scale.
What’s not to love about an architectural folly? Every time I’m in a cab heading back from Heathrow and I pass architect Ralph Erskine’s early-Nineties “Ark” – a late-period postmodernist office block in west London that resembles Noah’s implausible escape vessel – I think two things: firstly, how glad I am that I’m nearly home; and secondly, isn’t that building nuts?!
The same could be said of the Southampton Harbour Hotel, which opened one year ago this week. Surrounded by luxury yachts on the city’s Ocean Village Promenade, its big selling point was always visual: it looks exactly like one of the transatlantic cruise ships that set sail regularly from this same stretch of water – a five-star simulacrum in perpetual dry dock. When I checked in recently, the hotel still seemed freshly minted, as if at any moment Elaine Stritch might appear with a bottle of Mumm champagne to launch it.
The Southampton Boat Show was in full swing at the time. Men in fleece gilets were milling around talking boat talk and drinking gallons of local gin in the rooftop HarBAR.
I was impressed by the slickness of it all: the expensive sports cars outside and the glass, white and pale blue interiors, with art books about Jasper Johns and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s dreadlocks peppered around the place.
It’s like a super-modern Tyrolean plastic surgery clinic, but with a soupçon of Milton Keynes new town about it. Squint on a sunny day, and this could even be Auckland, New Zealand. My bedroom (a Deluxe Suite, from £435) had maritime stripes and blues, but with pops of orange.
The comfort level is high, the theming is gentle: there are paintings of sailing boats on the walls, but executed with mild abstraction, so they aren’t too on the nose. It’s luxury, but all light as air. I also had my own huge terrace over the water, albeit with little privacy – my neighbours had alarmingly clear sight lines to me.
A friend who lives one town away offered me his opinion on the place: “Pretentious.” I think that’s just a raised eyebrow at something shiny and new. The Jetty bar and restaurant on the ground floor, as well as HarBAR, buzz with a good time being had by all – and the staff are ceaselessly cheery. The hotel’s interiors are bright, colourful and sophisticated, while the glass architecture and the views remain the thing. Summer sunsets must be wondrous here. The restaurant menus are accessible but the food is nicely finessed (with plenty of perfectly cooked, locally caught fish). I was delighted to see a grotesquely unfashionable oaked chardonnay by the glass on the list at Jetty, so I had two of them.
It wasn’t all plain sailing, though. I detest being asked for my email address to access Wi-Fi and I searched high and low for a “do not disturb” sign in my room (which was finally located on a desk, as far away from the door as possible).
While I was invited to meander from my room to the spa in my bathrobe, there were no slippers in the wardrobe, so I set off in my towelling gown and a pair of Nike Air Max. I had been told to head to level one, but a sign there read “treatments in progress”, which I took to mean “No entry”. The lift buttons read “Spa access” on two and three. They lied.
Further exploration revealed two different entrances on the ground level for hotel and spa. Eventually someone led me to where I needed to be, but not before a variety of guests in a variety of lifts had enjoyed the sight of me, my bathrobe and the Nikes.
Eccentric layouts and bewildering signage aside, a stay at the Southampton Harbour Hotel would be preferable to one on most actual boats.
My sole seafaring experience to date was yachting up the Dalmatian coast with two exceptionally amorous Swedish teenage crew members in the midst of a summer romance, and one problematic chemical toilet.
Every time I tried to sleep, the waves, the noise and the olfactory surprises sent me straight into the nightmare sequence from Rosemary’s Baby, in which Mia Farrow floats while fornicating with the devil. I counted the minutes until we reached dry land.
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That experience, coupled with the idea of being stuck on a mega-cruise liner with a group of rotund bores, means that a high-speed ferry is as much as I will commit to in terms of seafaring. The Southampton Harbour Hotel is a kind of hyper-real alternative to a cruise. Stay here for a couple of nights, then fly to whichever destination you were planning to reach by sea.
Rooms from £225 including continental breakfast. There are four accessible rooms.
