Sir Savigny

How concerned should you be when the taxi turns into your hotel’s street and the first thing you see is a sex shop? One that looks like a car showroom and, judging by the gent surreptitiously sloping through a beaded curtain, offers a full valet?

For the first of many times, Mr Smith and I simply shrug: ‘Well, that’s Berlin for you’. Ditto when a 6pm stroll along the more clothed end of Kantstraße reveals the latest in German work-wear to be a dress shirt, sports shorts and a construction-site safety boot. Indisputably Berlin.

Bookended by these spectacles, Sir Savigny isn’t going to be a wallflower. Situated between distaste and interesting taste, this designer den sticks simply with taste – and it’s good at it.

The first standout is the smell. The hotel equivalent of freshly baked sourdough; it’s like entering a Diptyque shop without having to cough up £50 for a floral candle. Forget the ‘Lynx effect’, if only Sir Savigny’s foyer could be bottled up into fabric conditioner.

Reception isn’t your conventional, business-style affair. In fact, there is no reception. Check-in (which more like a catch-up between friends) takes place at the lounge table – a 12-person hunk of polished wood that forms the hotel’s hub. Hack space, breakfast buffet, Negroni hour, 2am post-party debrief: it all happens around the high-gloss equivalent of your friend’s kitchen island. Case in point: the wine is uncorked immediately upon arrival.

While we’re sipping the good stuff, the staff nail that tricky combination of being achingly hip, plus hip-achingly good tour guides. I blame their skill at selling the city’s attractions as the reason why I skipped the nearby Savignyplatz S-Bahn train station and took to sightseeing on foot – all 18km of it – the next day. Or maybe it was because by then I already knew what awaited my aching soles on my return – namely, The Bed.

For all the Chinese whispers about the suite with the freestanding bathtub (it wasn’t ours, so remains the stuff of foam-lore), the word around the wooden table is how exceptional the beds are.

Maybe Mr Smith and I came at it from a place of peculiar desperation – in the thick of gutting and renovating our 1900s home in Barcelona, we’d spent the previous two months living in a rental apartment with two single beds and brown décor that made Picasso’s depressive blue phase seem like the Headspace app.

So while Mr Smith enthused that Sir Savigny had the same gold art-deco light switches we’d just bought for our own home, I was reduced to monosyllabic child-like squeals: ‘Bed! Big! Yes!’ Remembering the X-rated establishment nearby, I knew our German neighbours probably wouldn’t bat an eyelid at such exclaims.  

When your eyelids are open – and factor in at least eight hours for this not being the case – the room is a beauty: slate-grey floor tiles, gilded taps, mustard-yellow velvet furnishings and lashings of Jaguar-green leather. Lighting comes from low-hanging bulbs that anywhere else would look like the owners hadn’t found the right lampshade, but here scream German efficiency.

Take the mini-bar: a black vase with a single flower stem rubs shoulders with James Joyce’s Ulysses, a crystal decanter and a full-sized bottle of specialist vodka. Mark my slurs: this is no ugly airline drinks trolley.

One of the room’s best features is the burger buzzer that dials directly to the Butcher restaurant downstairs. I say ‘best’ not because you’ll necessarily use it – juicy splodges of Aberdeen Angus on those bed sheets? – but because the Butcher really is exceptionally good. It’s often considered a cop-out to stay and eat in the hotel restaurant: the snobbery only decreasing as the Michelin stars increase. Here, the star is a slab of meat, and I have no qualms to admit that Mr Smith and I ate here not once – but twice.

By genre, the Butcher does what it says on the swanky metro tiles. Yes, another hipster burger place, but one with style and substance. Cooking isn’t hidden behind industrial pipes, but happens beside the street window, in some kind of staggeringly well-ventilated indoor BBQ. The aesthetic is like Soho House did a collaboration with your village butcher. Staff dance and nod their man buns along to the music pumped out, possibly, to disguise our burger slurps: soul tunes on Thursday night; 90s hip-hop on Friday. It’s rumoured to turn into techno after midnight; I would confirm, if it weren’t for The Bed.

What to eat? The Daddy is the Adidas Stan Smiths of the menu – a can’t-go-wrong mix of beef (charred on the outside, bloody inside), gooey Edam, crispy bacon and a dollop of BBQ sauce and onions. Burgers aside, the slow-cooked baby back ribs are a sticky, chilli-y, mouth-tingly sensation. Pair with the pomegranate quinoa salad if your new meat-free fad has suddenly gone the way of the barman’s baseball cap – backwards.

You can always be healthy at breakfast, of course. Though my money’s on the pancakes: a crispy, spongy, honey-drizzled foursome. Maybe the most erotic thing in Berlin isn’t at the other end of the street, after all.