Raffles London at The OWO: Whitehall's War Office Opens Its Doors

Few buildings in London carry the weight of the Old War Office. The Edwardian baroque colossus on Whitehall — a thousand rooms, miles of corridor, turrets that anchor one of the capital's great streetscapes — was where Churchill worked as Secretary of State for War, and its marble staircases have carried a century of statesmen and spymasters. That such a building should open its doors to the public at all is remarkable; that it should do so as Raffles' London debut, after a restoration of extraordinary scale and patience, made it the defining British opening of 2023.

The restoration

The project, years in the making, split the building between 120 hotel rooms and suites and a collection of private residences, with the finest heritage spaces — the grand staircase, the panelled former offices of state — painstakingly returned to their original condition. The hotel's suites named for historical figures trade on the building's past without embalming it, and the subterranean levels now hold a Guerlain spa and a swimming pool of serious ambition. It is a conversion that answers the obvious question — can a war office feel warm? — with unexpected conviction.

The OWO is not a hotel with history attached. It is history, with a hotel very carefully threaded through it.

Nine kitchens and a destination bar

Raffles took an expansive view of the building's public life, installing a portfolio of restaurants and bars rather than a single flagship dining room. The headline commitment came from Mauro Colagreco, the chef behind Menton's celebrated Mirazur, who oversees several of the venues including the fine-dining flagship that bears his name. The result is that Whitehall — a street previously offering the passing visitor almost nothing after dark — has acquired one of London's most complete eating and drinking addresses.

London's grand-hotel map has traditionally clustered in Mayfair and along the Strand; The OWO plants a flag in monumental Westminster, with St James's Park, the river and the West End all within a ten-minute walk. Against the capital's established names it competes on a currency none can mint: the frisson of sleeping inside a building that shaped the twentieth century. For the traveller who measures a hotel by its story as much as its thread count, this is now the London booking to beat.

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