LONDON — For anyone who likes their Louis Vuitton with a side order of Champagne, a lobster roll or raspberry tarts adorned with the brand’s Monogram flower, then Berkeley Square’s newest hotel is the place to be.
The Louis Vuitton Hotel, which opens Friday, is a pop-up with a Champagne bar downstairs, a restaurant overlooking the leafy Mayfair square and a care-and-repair service on the ground floor.
Although people can’t stay overnight, the handbags can. Artisans are on board to clean and restore snaps, straps and metallic sliders, or personalize the bags with a hot-stamping service.
Located in a grand Georgian-era townhouse, the London hotel is the final, and only European, stop in a pop-up series marking 130 years of the Louis Vuitton Monogram. Earlier this year hotel pop-ups opened in Shanghai’s Xuhui district; at Vuitton’s SoHo store in New York City, and at its Dosan location in Seoul.
The London hotel, which will remain open for two months, engages all five senses. It offers fashion, food and extra helpings of heritage and history across four floors. Walls are dotted with vintage ad campaigns, while the ceilings of the Noé bar downstairs are covered in the brand’s signature check.
There’s an interactive element, too. Visitors can press buttons near the bags displays, or dial 1-9-3-0 on a vintage telephone and listen to the history of the designs and of the brown and gold patterned canvas Monogram itself, which was registered at the Paris Archives in 1896.
Entire rooms are dedicated to some of the brand’s best-known Monogram bags, the Speedy and Keepall styles, both of which were created in 1930; the Noé, designed in 1932 to carry five bottles of Champagne; the Alma from 1992, considered a tribute to Parisian architecture, and the roomy Neverfull tote from 2007, which is engineered to carry a weight up to 200 pounds.
The London hotel has a Keepall lobby, with its own front desk and a calligrapher personalizing postcards that feature vintage Louis Vuitton campaign imagery. On weekends, there will also be a poet able to compose rhymes — on the spot — that weave people’s personal histories with that of the brand.
There are shelves and carousels of books, including the Louis Vuitton travel guides and coffee table tomes that look at the history of the vintage hotel stickers, or delve into places ranging from Paris to Pompeii.
An upstairs floor is given over to Café Alma, which serves lunch and afternoon tea along with Ruinart and Dom Perignon Champagnes. Up another flight of stairs is the Speedy Room, and a small Speedy P9 “safe room.”
Inside the smaller room, a display showcases the work that goes into constructing the P9, a colorful, calfskin leather Speedy developed by Pharrell Williams for the men’s spring 2024 collection. The bag has 60 components, while its making requires 240 steps and 29 customizing tools.
Nearby, another room is dedicated to fragrance and the Louis Vuitton makeup range. The bottles and makeup are displayed on a glossy wood Art Deco “coiffeuse,” or dressing table, based on the original design by Pierre-Émile Legrain. The original piece was commissioned by Gaston Louis Vuitton in the 1920s and was the first piece of furniture sold by the house.
A similar dressing table is part of Louis Vuitton’s Objets Nomades collection, which is on display this week at Milan’s Salone del Mobile.
The Neverfull has its own gym, which resembles the real thing but wasn’t made for press-ups — or drops of sweat. Instead, it houses a bench press hung with the capacious tote bags, some of which are filled with shiny LV-branded mini-barbells.
Visitors can book Café Alma, which has light lunch and afternoon tea menus, and Bar Noé, which serves Champagne, cocktails and caviar, through the Louis Vuitton app. The bar will remain open late, with a DJ spinning tunes on vinyl, during weekends.
In an interview, Louis Vuitton chairman and chief executive officer Pietro Beccari, who’s been spearheading the many tributes to the Monogram this year, said he wanted to make one thing clear about the London opening.
“There no hidden message about Louis Vuitton wanting to go into hotels. But we are linked to hotels in so many ways. We have always accompanied the life of the traveler, and in this era of Airbnb, we wanted to return to the idea of the luxury hotel. It’s a very romantic way to present our magical icons, and to speak about the Monogram,” he said.
Of late, Louis Vuitton has been in a particularly romantic mood when it comes to retail, exploring imaginative, immersive concepts that stretch far beyond product.
“People like experiences, they want to visit museums, go to spas and have a relationship with culture. They want to do more than just buy. They want to immerse themselves in the history and culture of the brand and return home and tell beautiful stories. And we want them to spend time with the brand and come back to us,” Beccari added.
The pop-up hotels are the latest in a string of concept spaces. “The Louis,” a life-size cruise ship that brings together retail, hospitality and an exhibition under one roof, docked in Shanghai last year.
Two years ago, Louis Vuitton opened LV The Place in Bangkok, a permanent space with an immersive exhibition called Visionary Journeys, a café and a restaurant by chef Gaggan Anand.
Last year, it opened LV The Place Seoul inside The Reserve, part of department store group Shinsegae’s renovated luxury complex in the popular shopping district of Myeongdong.
The six-story space features a combination of brand history, exclusive collections and fine dining, all designed to lure back younger shoppers, who have turned their backs on luxury products in favor of experiences.
While Louis Vuitton might be hyper-focused on new concepts and locations, it still treasures London, its oldest international market.
“It’s also one of the major capitals, and one of the most important markets from a business and client perspective. Local British clients are very important to us and London remains an important city,” said Beccari.
London was also the site of Louis Vuitton’s first store outside Paris. The first store opened here in 1885 around the corner from Claridge’s. “That’s why we wanted London to be the last stop for the Louis Vuitton Hotel,” Beccari said.
The pop-up is the biggest Louis Vuitton event to take place in London for more than a decade. In 2015, the French brand staged a show called “Series 3” at 180 Strand that attracted around 100,000 visitors.
That show was designed as a behind-the-scenes look at a fashion show and was meant to highlight the craft and creativity that goes into staging one. Visitors could see artisans from Louis Vuitton demonstrate the assembly process for artistic director for women’s collections Nicolas Ghesquière’s miniature trunk bags, and place their hands on interactive screens that mimicked all the steps involved in making a handbag.
There have been smaller events over the years. In 2023, Louis Vuitton nodded to its London heritage by creating the Claridge’s Christmas tree, a sculpture made from wardrobe trunks that stood 17 feet tall in the hotel’s Art Deco lobby.
The tree was made from 15 chrome, repurposed trunks of varying heights that were stacked to create the silhouette of a traditional tree, and styled to reflect the hotel’s architecture. The sculpture was adorned with vintage Claridge’s travel stickers, and an oversize Louis Vuitton luggage tag.
Claridge’s and Louis Vuitton were both founded in 1854 and both had strong ties to Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III.
Monsieur Louis Vuitton was the personal “layetier” to the empress, the man responsible for creating her arsenal of luggage. M. Vuitton would have packed the empress’ trunks himself for her Claridge’s stays, according to the company.
While the pop-up series may end with London, the 130th anniversary celebrations of the Monogram will continue throughout the year. Beccari declined to give any details, but said “there are definitely some surprises in store.”
