London with Starwood and Hermes

I can count on one hand the amount of times that I have been staying in London for work and not carried on working into the evening from my hotel!  Last week however it was a case of all change – twice!

SPG Moments

The lovely people at SPG invited me to join them in the SPG Suite at The O2 for the Sting and Paul Simon ‘On Stage Together’ concert.  They also provided a room for me at their Aloft hotel over at Excel! Sadly I couldn’t join their focus group the following day as I wasn’t able to take the day off – next time…

I have stayed at the Aloft hotel a number of times already when I have been in town and also used a few in the US. It is a really clever hotel concept – very well priced (especially for London), impeccably clean and functional but with the ever comfortable Starwood bed, nice common areas and facilities too that many more central hotels can’t offer (pool, gym, large bar etc).  If you are an av-geek then you won’t have a problem with the view – plane spot to your heart’s content as the planes come and go from City Airport!

Proximity to The O2 is fantastic!  Kelly from Around the World in 80 Pairs of Shoes and I travelled from the hotel together and we took a flight on the Emirates Airways to avoid the tube in rush-hour!  Oyster Cards work on here (although it is pricey in comparison to the tube) and you get a great view!  Top tip – if your travel companion isn’t keen on heights then don’t get up or start moving around… The pod swings… Kelly held it together though – even if I did tell her we were on the way down before we actually were…

The O2 is fab – I hadn’t been for years and the area around it has been really well developed since then!  We arrived nice and early and enjoyed sticking our noses into each of the private boxes/suites as we sought out the SPG Suite.  Always interesting!! SPG’s has just opened and is perfectly located in front of the stage – everything is luxury hotel spec inside and so it is a very well appointed space!  We were there on the day that Starwood announced its Tribute Portfolio – this sounds fascinating and spot on what is needed.  With the support of a massive hotel chain, independent hotels can thrive and it will open up new types of hotels to stay at, the sort that I tend to seek out for R&R, safe in the knowledge they are luxury quality.

SPG Moments is something else new from Starwood – hence the suite.  SPG members can use their points to attend shows and concerts at a number of venues across the world, The 02 is just one of the options!  Great idea – so many of us collect our points through business travel and being able to do something a little different with them is a really good idea, and offers great access to something normally reserved for corporates!

We had a great evening – I have always liked Sting, but I didn’t realise how many of his songs I knew nor how many of Paul Simon’s I also knew!  My favourite song of the evening was ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’ but it was Sting that made that song – his voice in the solo was incredible, all the more noticeable because it wasn’t something I had heard him do a rendition of before!

It was great to meet some other bloggers and also have a chilled out evening doing something very different to working at my laptop! You will have noticed the cakes – Eric Lanlard was there with his cup-cakes.  No dairy free this time, but I think that Kelly and I will be making a trip to see Eric at Cake Boy London soon!

I understand the party continued back at the hotel in the early hours… but unfortunately I had to be at work by 8am so I was very sensible and took myself off to bed!

Hermes Wanderland

I love my Hermes watch and perfume and I have grand plans to grow my collection of things that come in pretty orange bags over the years… Hermes is coming to Heathrow T5 where I seem to spend an undue amount of time!  Imagine my delight when I heard about the exhibition at the Saatchi gallery – well we had to go!  As I was flying out to India the following Saturday I agreed to leave work early and meet Mr P at Sloane Square for date afternoon!  We had a lovely mooch around the gallery and did plenty of people watching in the vicinity!…

We aren’t art lovers or gallery visitors – when we were in New York we visited the Met not for the art, but for the roof top wine bar! But this exhibition was fantastic – so well put together, it was a little like the ‘Launch-pad’ at the Science Museum but for fashionistas!  So much to see.  There were really good hosts and guides in each of the different rooms.  So much to see that I could happily have gone round and round!

There were I believe 11 rooms to enjoy and each was entirely different – with Hermes paraphanalia all over the place, be that bags, watches, walking canes, crockery, other leather goods and other home items.  Such a lot of thought had gone into using the space cleverly and nothing was cordoned off – this was access all areas.  I particularly liked the elephant in the china shop (not a bull as we say in England).

Since we went to the gallery I have had a trawl through the hashtag on Instagram as there is even more to see than we spotted.  If you get a chance to visit before the exhibition closes then I would really recommend it, my photos only scratch the surface at what there is to see and enjoy!

All in all a busy couple of days in London but very enjoyable – I will be watching out for other things happening in the city this summer.  It was really relaxing to take an evening to do something different and non-work related.  It is all too easy to forget to enjoy London for what it is and just visit for work!