André Balazs’s hotel in a Victorian fire station on Chiltern Street has been closed since a fire in February 2025 destroyed its roof, and it has published no date to reopen.
The building at 1 Chiltern Street was built as a fire station in 1889 and served as one for more than a century. André Balazs converted it into Chiltern Firehouse between about 2010 and 2013. On the afternoon of 14 February 2025 a fire started in its ground-floor restaurant. The hotel has been closed since, and says only that it will remain closed until further notice.
What the fire took
The fire travelled from the restaurant to the roof through the ducting. Twenty fire engines and around 125 firefighters worked on it for more than eight hours, and around 100 people left the building before the first crews arrived. The roof and the third floor were destroyed, around half of the second floor was damaged, and the interiors below suffered smoke and water damage, heaviest on the upper floors.
A listed station to rebuild
The building has been listed at Grade II since 1984. Its list entry describes red brick with stone dressings in a free Tudor-Gothic style, three altered engine doors at street level, and carved corbels in the form of firemen’s helmeted heads beneath the gable. Every part of the repair therefore runs through listed building consent. An application prepared in July 2025 by the heritage architects who advised on the original conversion sought consent to remove burnt timbers and the fill between the floors.
The hotel has named no date, and nothing it has issued describes the rooms, restaurant or courtyard it intends to bring back.