The refurbishment of this Victorian townhouse hotel in King’s Cross has preserved the past to collide and blend with modern art and the designer’s ‘anti-luxury’ philosophy

Designer: Rabih Hage

Leave your preconceptions of luxury hotels at the door of one of London’s latest establishments, Rough Luxe, the creation of celebrated designer and gallery curator Rabih Hage and a novel approach in the business of hospitality.

Forget the sterile atmosphere of air conditioning, marbled flooring, polished finishes and neutral colour palettes. Rough Luxe is the complete antithesis.

‘Beauty is subjective,’ declares Hage. ‘Perfection doesn’t mean beauty. It’s not important. What makes a place great to stay is the location, the welcome you get and how well you are looked after.’

Inside Rough Luxe, just a step away from King’s Cross station in the heart of London and tucked away down a quiet side street in a early Victorian terraced house, is a fascinating blend of partially sanded surfaces and stripped walls, bare floorboards, chipped paint and rough edges.

You may be forgiven for thinking the builders haven’t quite finished, but then there is the opulent contemporary wallpapers and modern art, plus top quality furnishings. Welcome to the anti-luxury of Rabih Hage,

In this listed building dating from the 1850s there are nine guests rooms. Most, but not all, have en suite bathrooms, but all are small, intimate and comfortable. Original light fittings and door fixtures beguile with their period charm and obvious wear.

Early on in the refurbishment of the hotel - run for decades by an Italian family, and in dire need of an update - layers of wallpaper were peeled away to reveal decors going right back to the Victorian age. The idea of the designer was to keep this intriguing archaeology of interior design, rather than destroying it or covering it over again.

The texture of years past is tangible in every room. The roughness of the walls celebrates the papering, priming, painting and patching of the preceding decades, and in each room the deconstructed walls contrast with chic contemporary paper and huge murals created from photographs of interiors by Massimo Listri, creating an illusion of opulence and space in this narrow townhouse.

This all explains the ‘Rough’ in the hotel’s name, but what about the ‘Luxe’? This can be seen and felt in the top-quality beds and mattresses, the fine bed linens and characterful furniture featured in all the rooms.

Top-class crockery, cutlery, fittings and furniture were scooped up at the Savoy Hotel auction, with Hage making the bids in person.

The Rough Luxe kitchen, dating from the Sixties, has been preserved, albeit with some up-todate additions. And in the dining room, guests sit around a communal table made from wood salvaged from Brighton Pier, beneath a modern twist on trompe-l’oeil - an imposing ceiling photograph of a Renaissance dome.

Tucked away in an alcove is the entertaining ‘anger release machine’ by artists Yarisal and Kublitz; there is a book collection for guests to dip into, and in summer there is an outside café, all underlining Hage’s concept that Rough Luxe is not only a place where old and new can collide and blend, but also a lifestyle club.

Rough Luxe is the first translation of the concept, but more is planned, with ideas for the philosophy to be unrolled in a cowshed in St Moritz and a wine cellar in northern Spain.