Edinburgh, United Kingdom

21212

Price per night from$157.82

Price information

If you haven’t entered any dates, the rate shown is provided directly by the hotel and represents the cheapest double room (including tax) available in the next 60 days.

Prices have been converted from the hotel’s local currency (GBP125.00), via openexchangerates.org, using today’s exchange rate.

Style

Grand Georgian

Setting

Behind Calton Hill

Baroque-leaning bolthole 21212 pairs grand Georgian design with a haute home-y feel in its four regal and refined rooms. Set a little beyond Edinburgh’s turreted Royal Mile, at the bottom of calmer Calton Hill, the hotel’s art-deco(ed) sign is hard to miss against the terrace’s historic townhouses. But step inside, and you’re met with intimate interiors, lofty ceilings and grand sash-window seats that make for a serene stay in Scotland’s historical hub.

Smith Extra

Get this when you book through us:

A mini decanter of sloe gin in your room on arrival; in the apartment, you'll find a mini bottle of Drambuie instead

Facilities

Photos 21212 facilities

Need to know

Rooms

Four.

Check–Out

12pm. Earliest check-in, 3pm. Check-in past 10pm can't be done without prior guarantee – call the Smith24 Team for more details.

Prices

Double rooms from £150.00, including tax at 20 per cent.

More details

Rates include a Continental breakfast.

Also

Guests with mobility issues should note rooms are on the second and third floor; there's no lift in this Georgian townhouse.

Please note

Despite the restaurant’s closure, the hotel will continue to serve a Continental breakfast. Please speak to a member of the Smith24 travel team if you have any questions regarding the closure.

At the hotel

Free WiFi throughout, and Noble Isle bath products, Bluetooth speaker and free bottled water in rooms.

Our favourite rooms

Decisions should be based on varying penchants for bathrooms and views (opt for a view of the garden, Calton Hill or the Firth of Forth). Rooms on the second floor come with huge Spanish showers, sturdy egg-shaped bath tubs and twin sinks.

Packing tips

Binoculars to take up Calton Hill and admire the city’s sights close up. Leave your bagpipes at home and be serenaded by the experts instead.

Also

Guests with mobility issues should note rooms are on the second and third floor; there's no lift in this Georgian townhouse.

Children

You'll need to leave tots under five at home, but children aged five-and-up are welcome in the hotel.

Food and Drink

Photos 21212 food and drink

Top Table

Stay in room for sweeping sash-window seat views.

Dress Code

Don your best cashmere, you are in Edinburgh after all.

Hotel restaurant

The hotel doesn't have it's own restaurant, but Lyla – a seafood-focused tasting restaurant helmed by chef Stuart Ralston – has set up shop where the late-chef Paul Kitching once worked his own kind of culinary magic. For other local hotspots, head to Advocate’s Close, just off the Royal Mile, for romantic dinners à deux or wander to Saint Andrew’s Square, where brasseries and bars await.

Hotel bar

Cosy up in Lyla’s bar with a creative cocktail or an aperitif from the champagne trolley. It's a sumptuous space with high ceilings and luxurious furnishings.

Last orders

A Continental breakfast is served from 8.15am until 10am.

Location

Photos 21212 location
Address
21212
3 Royal Terrace
Edinburgh
EH7 5AB
United Kingdom

The hotel is on Edinburgh's Royal Terrace, right by the Playhouse and at the bottom of Calton Hill where you'll be privy to monumental city sights.

Planes

Edinburgh’s international airport is a 25-minute drive from 21212.

Trains

The city’s Waverley train station is half a mile from the hotel. Taxis cost roughly £5 each way. East Coast (www.eastcoast.co.uk) operates direct services from London King’s Cross.

Automobiles

The hotel is in the centre of Edinburgh, just behind Carlton Hill and at the top of Leith Walk. There’s metered parking available on the Royal Terrace and surrounding streets.

Worth getting out of bed for

The hotel sits at the foot of Calton Hill; climb to the top for a photogenic city panorama with the unfinished National Monument in the foreground. While you’re up there, see what’s on at the Collective Gallery, where modern art is displayed. The Edinburgh Playhouse is close by for musicals and concerts, and Broughton Street is renowned for its quirky indie shops and eateries – Scandi bakery Söderberg makes cracking cinnamon and cardamom buns. Princes Street and gardens are a five-minute walk, so you can sweep through the National Gallery, admire the genteel Georgian houses in the New Town then hike up the Mound to the Royal Mile, stopping to pap Edinburgh Castle along the way. The Old Town’s cobbled main drag has historic monuments aplenty, between the castle at the top and Palace of Holyroodhouse at the bottom. Along the way you’ll find the Camera Obscura, Museum of Childhood and several grand ‘kirks’. Things take a grim turn, too: the Surgeons’ Hall Museum has ghoulish artefacts, such as purses made from the skin of hanged murderers Burke and Hare, and ghost walks run up and down the mile (and sometimes into the labyrinth of crypts beneath it).

Local restaurants

L’Escargot Bleu on Broughton Street is neighbourhood French dining at its finest; come for the cassoulet and mussels, but leave room for the cheeseboard. The Edinburgh outpost of London’s Irani café-inspired Dishoom is around the corner on St Andrew Square. Pop in for breakfasts of bacon-stuffed naan and free-flowing chai lattes or sharing plate dinners of spicy daal, lamb biryani and creamy pau bhaji. It's worth the 40-minute stroll to the Leith Docks, to see the Royal Yacht Britannia and to dine at Heron, an excellent eatery where all ingredients are seasonal or Scottish. On the way, swing by Cables Wynd House (aka the Banana Block); this Brutalist block was the setting for the even more brutal Irvine Welsh tome Trainspotting, now it's a Category A-listed building.

Local cafés

If you’re down by the docks, pop into Porto & Fi, a café, deli and bistro hybrid serving freshly caught lobster, wild boar meatballs and such.

Local bars

Edinburgh is awash with bars (the infamous Rose Street pub crawl has 12 stops along one street), so take your pick and pick your poison. For copious drams of Scotland's aqua vitae, try Whiski on the Royal Mile or the more informal Black Cat on Rose Street. Paradise Palms promises kitschy fun, and the Hanging Bat is a Scandi-style hangout that's perfect for a swift pint. In Leith, Nobles has chichi cocktails, Malt and Hops on South Street pulls CAMRA-approved pints and the Roseleaf is a sweet welcoming drinkery where mixed drinks come in teacups.

Reviews

Photos 21212 reviews
Marina  O'Loughlin

Anonymous review

By Marina O'Loughlin, Clandestine critic

Since I wasted away my late teenage years at Auld Reekie’s major seat of learning, I’ve never been back to the Scottish capital. A combination of being a lousy student, plus having a grant so minuscule it compelled me to live on smoked sausage suppers (one of the capital’s more recherché culinary specialities) and ‘Carlsberg Special With a Vodka In It’, left me with less-than-happy memories. Nor, back then, was Edinburgh big on the kind of thing that might appeal to the trainee sybarite. Little wonder I spent so much time huddling in gorgeous Edwardian pubs against the biting East Coast wind.

But my, how things have changed. Edinburgh now boasts the greatest number of Michelin-starred restaurants in the UK outside London. And quirkily monikered 21212, offers the ideal excuse to go back. A certifiably insane taxi driver drops us at a perfect example of Edinburgh’s legendary Georgian architecture, a towering townhouse, all impossibly lofty ceilings, sweeping staircase (complete with original butlers trays) and stunning windows.

My Mr Smith is utterly smitten, not only with our hotel, but with Edinburgh in general. If he says, ‘This has to be Britain’s most beautiful city,’ just once more, any romantic notions might be severely dashed. Which at 21212 would be an enormous shame. From the ‘pod’ in which we take our breakfast – as remarkable as everything else: eggs turned into Mirò paintings with slicks of herb and jewels of Bayonne ham; locally smoked salmon generously strewn with caviar – to the vast, snowy linened bed, this a scene perfectly designed for seduction.
 
Our host is Katie O’Brien, charming us to pieces on reception or serving breakfast. We’re in room 1, up a staircase carpeted in arresting thistle-and-moth patterned carpets from Glaswegian designer duo, Timorous Beasties. Our windows look out over greenery to the distant Firth of Forth; a huge, crisp-sheeted bed lolls on a curtained platform; there’s a large but discreet plasma-screen TV, a soft, nubbly sofa to collapse into, and masses of glossy, foodie-focused goodies to read. A lovely touch is a vintage decanter of port. Nightcaps, ahoy.

As for the huge bathroom, it is rather like having our own personal spa. A vast shower offers gusts of high-pressure water; an egg-shaped bath is most glamorous and comes complete with floor-set uplighters for creating a special bathtime mood; there are Noble Isle products on tap. And what’s this – underfloor heating? The toastiest toes, guaranteed, even in the depths of a Scottish winter: bliss.
 
The hotel is right next door to Calton Hill, a steep stagger up for an astonishing view of the city. And down the swoop of Leith Walk lie the bars and restaurant of the old docks. We take a walk down to the vaguely bonkers new Scottish Parliament building. Then it’s up the Royal Mile, along with every other tourist in town, to the Castle... Although, alas, we don’t quite make it.

We’re lured back to those glorious Edwardian pubs – the Kenilworth, Guildord and Abbotsford and seriously ravishing Café Royale, all beautifully preserved slices of the boozy past. We head down to louche Stockbridge and the Bailey, Kay’s and the St Vincent. I have stovies, the ugliest foodstuff ever seen, in the handsome Cumberland Bar. The oniony potatoes may cause Mr Smith to blanch at the eccentricities of the Scottish diet, but, mmm, they're good. We finally weave back – ‘We thought you’d got lost,’ says Katie – and concur it’s like staying in a pal’s super-posh home.


I’m trying hard to find a whinge about 21212. The stairs might prove a challenge for anyone with mobility issues (or those who’ve enjoyed too much of Edinburgh’s liquid hospitality). I suppose, like an excited child, I do like to find a minibar in my room. And it might be nice instead of all-French cheeses, to have Scottish ones on the menu. But you can tell I’m struggling. The hotel – and its lovely owners – have made this critic look at her old alma mater with a new, glowing appreciation. And that’s no small achievement.

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Price per night from $157.82