Hotel Hit Squad: a successful maiden voyage for Belfast's brand new Titanic Hotel?
The best thing about Belfast’s new Titanic Hotel is its extreme proximity to a gleaming, glittering, towering, fatally close iceberg. That was the horribly ironic thought that came to me as I first became acquainted with my deeply disappointing Penthouse Suite and spied from my window the landmark building that houses the popular Titanic Belfast visitor attraction, almost within touching distance (a must for all, not just Titanoraks). As tall as the Titanic’s hull, the building echoes the shape of a ship’s prow, but its angular outline and its cladding – some 3,000 individual silver aluminium shards – has earned it the nickname “The Iceberg”.
The Titanic Hotel’s 119 bedrooms are not its finest asset. They are reached via corridors that have a deliberately industrial, ship-like feel, with heavy riveted doors and dim lighting. They make the walk from reception to bedroom a tad foreboding. “Blimey,” said my sister as we hurried along. “I hope I don’t get trapped in the corridor if this hotel turns out to be a sinking ship.”
A sinking feeling certainly took hold when we reached our room. If the corridors made us feel like Titanic passengers (second class), our grey cabin was more suited to a battleship than a luxury liner. Like all the other bedrooms in the hotel – on which £28 million, including £5 million of Heritage Lottery money, has been lavished – it had art deco elements but lacked the glamorous, intimate charm of the reconstructed stateroom and cabins on display in the Iceberg.
The shower was cramped, with nowhere to hang towels and no conditioner; the tea and coffee were instant; and there were annoying fixed hangers in the utilitarian open-plan wardrobe. One wall had been made to resemble riveted steel panels. I could hardly imagine Leonardo and Kate’s passionate romance igniting here.
The beds were blissfully comfortable, though, and the bathrooms are attractive with their black and white tiles, if mostly small (only half have baths, the rest showers). What we enjoyed most, however, were those stupendous views of the Iceberg and the cranes and slipways of Belfast’s famous shipyards – part still in use, part regenerated, and now known as the Titanic Quarter of the city.
We also appreciated the photographs on the walls of the Titanic and her sister ship, Olympic (which sailed on successfully until the Thirties), and the plan of Titanic’s accommodation. And here lies the saving grace of the Titanic Hotel: it is stiff with poignant photographic memories of the White Star Line and its passengers and, apart from the bedrooms, it is authentic.
For a start, the hotel occupies the original headquarters of Harland & Wolff, builders of the Titanic and many more ocean-going liners besides. Its twin purpose-built Drawing Offices, constructed to allow maximum natural light, are both magnificent and strikingly beautiful.
Drawing Office No 1 now houses the ballroom; No 2 serves as its impressive bar – perfect for a drink or light lunch, with deep, comfy blue velvet sofas circling the room. Both of these domed, all-white spaces, filled with glass, have been beautifully restored. The bedrooms at the Titanic Hotel may disappoint, but the rest does not.
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Above Drawing Office No 2 is the Presentation Room, where prospective buyers were shown vast oil paintings of Harland & Wolff’s ships and could look through a glass wall at the company’s designers beavering away on plans below. This room has been decorated to look as it did in historic photographs; you can take tea just as the directors and their clients did, though you won’t be buying a ship.
In the original directors’ entrance hall is the remarkable curved, etched glass telephone exchange where on April 14 1912 the operators were paid an extra guinea each to stay all night and not leak the news of the Titanic’s sinking to the press. Also on show is the mahogany drawing table of Thomas Andrews, its chief naval architect, who saved many passengers’ lives by helping them on to lifeboats before losing his own in the disaster.
It is these elements, especially the Drawing Offices, that give the Titanic Hotel its sense of place and history and it was a pleasure spending time in No 2. Dinner in the Wolff Grill was a pleasure too (some superb beef and duck dishes). The head chef Nigel Mannion prefers the term “refined dining” to “fine dining”. Me too.
In short, our maiden voyage in the Titanic Hotel was a success, iceberg avoided. Two new-minted Titanoraks disembarked.
Doubles from £140 per night including breakfast. Adapted rooms for guests using wheelchairs.
• Read the full expert review: Titanic Hotel Belfast
