Oberoi Hotels & Resorts’ first UK hotel will take a listed 1890s corner on Brook Street, where a stair hall, two tower rooms and a wartime shelter sign survive from the building’s first life.
Ninety years after its founding, the Oberoi Group is bringing its name to a London hotel. The Oberoi, Mayfair will be the group’s first hotel in the UK, at 40–46 Brook Street, a Grade II listed Arts and Crafts building on the corner of South Molton Lane. Grosvenor and the group’s EIH London Investments announced the agreement in November 2024 as part of Grosvenor’s South Molton development, and neither has yet published an opening date.
Balfour and Turner’s crow-stepped gables
The building was designed for the Grosvenor Estate in 1898–9 by Balfour and Turner as a row of four terraced houses. It is red brick with Portland stone dressings, and five crow-stepped gables run along Brook Street before a polygonal tower turns the acute corner into South Molton Lane. Most of the windows are still the original six-over-six sashes, and the tall chimney stacks are banded in brick and stone.
The houses were later knocked through into a single office, with openings cut in the party walls. In 2022 Grosvenor, the estate that commissioned the houses, gained permission to restore the 33,000 square foot building.
Rooms the listing singles out
The corner house, No 40, kept the most through its office years. The listing records an octagonal stair hall with a chequered marble floor, a ground-floor room in the tower with rococo plasterwork of scrolling acanthus, and a first-floor tower room with an elaborate overdoor centred on an urn. Behind, the former rear rooms of Nos 44 and 46 have vaulted ceilings lit by skylights of painted glass.
The basement has its own history. A strongroom there still has its Ratner “patent thief resisting door”, and a painted sign by the area gate of No 46 marks the basement as a wartime shelter. Grosvenor presents the project as a luxury boutique hotel.
A long road to London
The group was established in 1934 and today runs hotels in India, Egypt, Indonesia, Mauritius and Morocco, with a first in Saudi Arabia in preparation. Its alliance with Mandarin Oriental already links it to two London hotels, on Hyde Park and in Mayfair. In May 2020 it signed to operate 23 serviced residences at 17–22 South Audley Street, then due for completion in 2022, which it called its debut in Europe. Brook Street will be its first hotel here. Arjun Oberoi, the group’s executive chairman, has described London as a key market for the group throughout its history.
Inside the South Molton scheme
The hotel is one part of a 370,000 square foot scheme beside Bond Street’s Elizabeth line station, with new offices on Brook Street and Davies Street and homes above the shops of South Molton Street. Work began in November 2023, and Grosvenor schedules every phase for completion by the end of 2027. On the hotel itself, the contractor reports the soft strip complete, basement underpinning due to begin in August 2026 and the enabling works programmed to finish in the third quarter of 2027.
No room count, restaurant or event space has been published yet. Claridge’s stands a short walk along the same street.