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Nightlife

Originally published on Tuesday, 5th April 2011

The Total Package

A Tight Little Package

Clerkenwell’s new Zetter Townhouse offers a slice of Georgian-themed escapism

Good things, they say, come in small packages. (Did we mention that we’re talking about venues, bars and hotels here? Well we are. So minds out of the gutter please.) What really matters is that there's a package at all – and that it's done well.

There’s something, for example, about the Spuntino package (children, really) and the consistency of everything from the pencil-behind-the-ear uniform to the cocktail glassware. Because in these over-hyped days, when a restaurant or bar door closes behind us, we want to be embraced by an experience. We want to be wooed into something so immersive, considered and complete that we get to forget the everyday humdrum outside. Over in Clerkenwell, for example, there’s something promisingly tight in the Zetter’s forthcoming sister, the Zetter Townhouse

Is it the 13 Russel Sage-designed, Georgian-inspired rooms? Is it the 69 Colebrooke Row-honed cocktail bar? Or Aunt Wilhelmina – the hotel’s fictitious, dotty, globetrotting sometimes-resident?

What about the cute navvy uniforms (think neckties and naval blue coats) or bespoke cocktail bitters in the hotel rooms (use them to battle hangovers, invoke an aphrodisiacal nudge, or, I dunno, get drunk)?

On their own, it’s none of these. On their own, these are just press hooks. But pull them all together into one considered package and something significantly tighter emerges: a complete world, where Aunt Wilhelmina sends postcards back from her travels, where we drink and rest and dance and the drudgery of our real world slips away. And that should be the goal of any good bar, restaurant or hotel.

by AC

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