Artist Residence Brighton

‘What do you give the American who has everything?’ I wondered as Mr Smith’s 30th birthday approached. I settled on a thoroughly British cultural experience, something he could never experience back at home in his native Southern California – a rainy weekend by the seaside.  

So off we trekked to Brighton, umbrellas in hand. The train from London Victoria was delayed – ‘Magnificent.’ I thought, ‘The most English start to the weekend possible.’ The taxi driver who picked us up from Brighton Station had never heard of Artist Residence (Mr Smith, who’d hitherto assumed all British drivers had the encyclopaedic training of London’s cabbies) was aghast. The driver did, though, know the address – Regency Square is a green seafront plaza flanked almost entirely by hotels. We’d stayed in one of the least salubrious of that number several times, the sort of place where the seafront location only just made up for the cheap-as-seagull-stolen-chips mattress and the all-night noise from the neighbours. I had much higher hopes for Artist Residence.

Those hopes were instantly encouraged by the neon sign beaming to us from the half-moon window above Artist Residence’s hot-pink door; once inside, we found ourselves surrounded by Friday night in full swing, with the Cocktail Shack off to the right of the check-in alcove and the Set Café’s bar just to our left. Despite the all-encompassing carousing, check-in was a swift delight, and we were soon snuggled up in the lift (do not attempt to share the lift with anyone you’re not also planning to share your bed with – it’s that tiny, as you’d expect in an historic Brighton townhouse.)

We flopped onto our sizeable bed and surveyed our temporary beachside home, quickly declaring the it a winner: Mr Smith loves a roll-top bath in the bedroom and I love things people will like on Instagram, and our Bigger House Sea View room had both. (We’re also both fans of Tunnock’s Caramel Wafers, of which there were several on the vintage desk.) The rain was already pounding on our windows, blurring the iconic view of Brighton’s burnt-out West Pier, but the rumbling in our stomachs couldn’t be ignored. 

We put our hoods up and trekked all of two minutes to the New Club just round the corner: although our previous stays on Regency Square hadn’t been anywhere near as comfortable or stylish as our Artist Residence jaunt, we did always eat well, and dinner at the New Club’s a stone's-throw favourite. After far too much mac ‘n’ cheese and milkshake (I’m pregnant, the calcium’s good for the baby) followed up by a sticky date pudding with whiskey-toffee sauce (I’m pregnant, I really miss alcohol) we let the sea breeze blow us back to the hotel, where we took the advice we’d overheard the waitress giving to the table next to ours at dinner: ‘You have to go to the Cocktail Shack tonight. It’s the best place to drink in Brighton.’ The bartender sympathised with my knocked-up-cocktail-lover woes and mixed me a Desmond Tutu, which somehow tasted like it might have alcohol in despite being fully midwife approved (Mr Smith very kindly conferred with me every time he ordered to make sure he only got tipples I fancied sipping. Mr Smith is really nice.) Then we remembered that roll-top tub, and poured ourselves back into the miniature lift for a lengthy soak before bed – the only thing that could’ve made the evening lovelier would’ve been bathrobes to slip into once we de-bath-ed.

We slept through breakfast, dozing to the sound the rain, as was the birthday boy’s wont (plus, we were still rather stuffed full of the night before’s cosy comfort food). When we did eventually drag ourselves out of the supremely comfy king-size bed, we didn’t feel like venturing too far – handily, our oysters-and-lobster lunch from the Regency café 30 seconds from the hotel made for a perfect – if unorthodox – beachside breakfast. It was then that the sun peeped out for a minute, and we made our only mistake of an otherwise error-free weekend: we went to the pier. Brighton Pier can be brilliant (I especially love it on cold and foggy days when there’s no one else weird enough to wander along it) but on that sunny-ish Saturday in May we found it packed with barefood vaping banshees screeching at their awful offspring. We quickly learnt our lesson and legged it back to our home-from-home on Regency Square for another lounge in the bath before dinner. 

…and it really was quite a dinner. Artist Residence’s Set Restaurant serves, as the name suggests, a choice of three set menus of seasonal British cooking – all inventive, and all delicious, as far as we could judge from our own meals and the satisfied utterings overheard from the neighbouring tables. (If you, like me, have a life-long love of the milk that’s left over after you eat all your Cheerios, the cereal-milk ice cream is a must.) It was the sort of meal that leaves your appetite so entirely sated you can’t imagine ever eating again… but remember, we’d skipped breakfast, and if I have any sort of raison d’être it’s hotel breakfasts. Mr Smith’s, on the other hand, would be Sunday-morning lie ins, so I dragged myself alone from that glorious bed and hoped the pancakes in the Set Café would be worth it… and they were, topped with mounds of cream and berries. They would, in fact, have made perfect birthday [pan]cakes, had the birthday boy not stayed snoozing upstairs.