A short walk through Shoreditch and you’ll easily pass six hotels in no time. Boutique openings a few doors down from family-run restaurants and corporate high-rises two streets over. The area doesn’t do one type of hospitality, it does all of them at once, on top of each other, and somehow that is what keeps it interesting rather than exhausting.
Which is the context you need for what has happened at 10-50 Willow Street. For eight years this was Nobu Hotel Shoreditch, the Ron Arad designed shell of angular concrete balconies and cantilevered steel that made the building look like it was mid collapse in the most deliberate way possible, with a sunken garden tucked into the eastern edge like an afterthought. Ben Adams Architects built Arad’s vision, Robert De Niro’s name went on the door, and for a while it was the address you gave people when you wanted them to know you were somewhere.
Now it’s become Aethos, the brand’s first UK property, and the building has not moved an inch. Same concrete, same glass, same frayed northern edge jutting into the street. If you’ve watched this stretch of Willow Street for a while, you’ll see it still reads as familiar because the bones haven’t changed. But what has changed is the welcome.
The lobby has been opened out into a room you actually want to sit in. Instead of just a front desk you clear as fast as possible, there’s a café and bar running along one side. Check in is a conversation rather than a transaction, somebody asking what you are in London for and offering up two or three spots that are not the obvious ones. You’re welcomed to your room by a glass of sake, poured deliberately too full so it overflows and pools on the saucer underneath. It is not authentic, and nobody is pretending it is. It is theatre, the kind that works on you anyway.
I was in one of the Aethos Skyline Rooms, which boasts floor to ceiling windows opening onto a private balcony with the kind of elevated view across East London that turns dull grey afternoons into decent entertainment, mostly because the people watching down on the street is genuinely some of the best in the city. Inside it is classic industrial chic with a Japanese inflection rather than a costume: raw concrete and natural timber against gold accents that catch the light without shouting about it. A European king bed, a 55 inch television that stayed off the entire stay, a stocked minibar, comfy slippers and a duvet doing an excellent impression of a robe. It makes staying in feel like the better option, which is either a compliment to the room or a problem for the neighbourhood.
Aethos runs on more than the 164 rooms. There is a members-only gym kitted out with Technogym equipment and a full weekly programme of yoga, pilates, breathwork and sound baths, with hot and cold therapy due to join it. The Willow Room is the building’s split personality made physical, a workspace by day with a restaurant, bar, library and terrace built in, then a different room entirely after dark when it turns into the venue for the club’s DJs and live music.
I got breakfast in the room, mostly because the alternative was five floors down and the balcony was right there. The menu has more range than most in-room offerings bother with, and the eggs came out silky rather than the rubbery version most hotels serve at scale. The coffee was the real win, noticeably good rather than the beige, apologetic stuff most breakfast trays carry.
Downstairs is Mitsu, the restaurant and listening bar that has taken over the space Nobu’s restaurant used to occupy. It is still built around Japanese cooking, still working a similar menu logic to what came before it, an izakaya built around a robata grill rather than a full reinvention. What has changed is the room, and it matters more than the menu does. The old dining room had a reputation for being dark in a way that swallowed conversation rather than encouraged it. Mitsu has pulled it into the light, a central bar giving the space something to organise itself around, booths with room to actually sit back in, a garden you can see rather than one you forget is there. It reads less like a hotel restaurant you eat at because you are staying upstairs, and more like somewhere you would book on its own merits, which is the actual test for any hotel restaurant and the one most of them fail.
The food backs it up. Wagyu sando, skewers off the grill, fried chicken with a genuinely good crust and dumplings all landing with the kind of flavour and texture that makes you order one more thing than you needed. The showpiece is the eel, lacquered and brought to the table still catching the light. If you want the honest pitch for a Shoreditch crowd that has eaten its way through every izakaya opening of the last five years, it is this: the building finally has a restaurant as good as its architecture, and the room no longer works against the food the way its predecessor did.
Aethos is easy on the eye and comfortable enough that you could happily not leave, but the real advantage is where it sits. The Griffin is around the corner for a pint, Passionevino is a few steps past that for something better from the natural wine list, and from there you are inside Columbia Road, Brick Lane and Old Street without having to think about transport at all. If you are in Shoreditch and have no intention of wandering far from it, this is about as well placed as a stay gets. It is in the thick of it.
Key Information
Address | 10 to 50 Willow Street, Shoreditch, London EC2A 4BH
For more information | aethos.com
