Goring Hotel

MAP Projects, working with Paul Davis Architecture, advised The Goring, London’s last family-owned luxury hotel, on a strategy to add a new basement spa, a roof-level floor and a modernised service core, unlocking additional space and facilities while keeping the hotel fully operational and protecting its heritage garden setting in the Grosvenor Gardens Conservation Area.

The hotel’s garden, one of London’s most admired private gardens, shaped the entire approach. Rather than treating expansion as an outward move, MAP looked above, below and within the existing building fabric, seeking to unlock value without compromising the guest experience, the garden, or the hotel’s heritage setting.

At roof level, a new floor was proposed to provide additional space while rationalising and concealing existing rooftop plant. This had the dual benefit of improving the hotel’s operational capacity and refining the building’s upper profile within the surrounding streetscape.

Within the plan, the enclosure of an internal lightwell allowed for the creation of a new service core, bringing the hotel up to modern standards with improved fire strategy, evacuation lifts and full accessibility across all floors. This was a key move in making the wider development viable, both operationally and in planning terms.

The new spa was conceived as a discreet below-ground intervention beneath the garden. The design strategy was to deliver a meaningful wellness offer for the hotel while causing the minimum possible disruption to the existing landscape. Once complete, the intervention was intended to disappear: the garden would remain the dominant experience, with the spa concealed below and the landscaping reinstated above.

A principle of retention underpinned the proposal. By working with the existing structure wherever possible, the scheme sought to protect the character of the hotel, reduce unnecessary demolition and limit embodied carbon. Retention also supported the operational strategy: less demolition meant less noise, less disruption and a more controlled programme of works capable of being sequenced around a fully functioning luxury hotel.