Tbilisi, Georgia

Stamba Hotel

Price per night from$200.00

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 (USD200.00), via openexchangerates.org, using today’s exchange rate.

Style

Trees’ company

Setting

Verdant Vera

As vibrant and creative as Tbilisi itself, Stamba Hotel creatively fuses the bones of a historic printing press with contemporary design, including jungle-inspired greenery and clustered lounging spaces. Trees sprout through floorboards in the living lobby, and vines snake up pillars. The hotel encourages lounging, offering an LP lending library and an in-house coffee and chocolate roastery. Upstairs, the well-equipped bedrooms hold top-of-the-line coffee machines and record players, along with super-king-sized beds and brass soaking tubs.

Smith Extra

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Homemade chocolates from the hotel's onsite chocolaterie

Facilities

Photos Stamba Hotel facilities

Need to know

Rooms

52, including two suites.

Check–Out

Noon. Earliest check-in, 3pm.

Prices

Double rooms from £186.93 ($236), including tax at 18 per cent.

More details

Rates don't generally include the buffet breakfast spread of fruit, breads, juice and coffee. It's US$24 for ages 13 and up, US$12 for ages 7-12, and free for ages six and under.

Also

Borrow vinyls from the lobby library to play on the in-room stereo. There’s also a professional-grade espresso machine, equipped with freshly roasted beans and a manual for newbies.

At the hotel

Music library, amphitheatre with regular events, photography museum, free WiFi throughout, on-site parking. In rooms: minibar, free bottled water and La Marzocco coffee machines.

Our favourite rooms

Every room is spacious, with a free-standing bathtub and separate shower. The Aviator Suites are especially large, with a separate living room.

Packing tips

Plan to bring home the hotel’s homemade chocolates as gifts – the cacao beans are roasted in-house.

Also

The common areas are wheelchair-accessible.

Children

All ages welcome, though the vibe is very adults-oriented. A baby cot can be added to rooms on request, providing there are no more than two adults staying in the room.

Food and Drink

Photos Stamba Hotel food and drink

Top Table

Take a table by the windows to see well-clad locals passing by.

Dress Code

Art-chic attire is ideal.

Hotel restaurant

Café Stamba puts an avant-garde twist on traditional Georgian dishes, using foraged and regional ingredients whenever possible. The breakfast buffet will quickly become a thriller for people who crave everything fresh and tasty. There's also the Chocolaterie and Roastery, serving craft brews made from beans sourced from Brazil, Colombia, Honduras and India, which are then roasted on-site at the hotel. The chocolate is of an equally impressive pedigree, this coming from farms in Venezuela, Madagascar, Peru and Colombia. Ask the staff to recommed their favourite combinations.

Hotel bar

The Pink Bar has quickly become one of Tblisi's go-to cocktail spots, serving enticing potions like the Stamba Mule, a medley of vodka, lavender, blueberry, ginger and lime. If you're after something softer, try one of the house-pressed juices.

Last orders

Breakfast is served until 11am on weekdays and noon on weekends. The restaurant closes at midnight, but you can prop up the bar until 1.30am.

Room service

The full menu is available for in-room dining.

Location

Photos Stamba Hotel location
Address
Stamba Hotel
14 Merab Kostava Street
Tbilisi
0108
Georgia

Stamba Hotel is in the Vera neighbourhood of Tbilisi.

Planes

Tbilisi International Airport, the country's hub, is a 30-minute drive from the hotel. Direct flights are available from select cities in Europe, including Paris. Connecting flights are available from London and the United States. Contact Smith24 for transfers.

Trains

Tbilisi Central Train Station, a 20-minute drive from the hotel, connects to other Georgian cities, including Batumi and Kutaisi.

Automobiles

Tbilisi has ample public transportation. Those who choose to hire a car can use on-site parking.

Worth getting out of bed for

Don’t be in a rush to go too far at Stamba. Each oversized room is designed to encourage guests to linger and feel at home. Bookcases are well-stocked with vacation reads, and stereos and an espresso machine help set the mood for a leisurely morning. The hotel also has an ampitheatre for live music and performative arts. As if that weren't enough, it also plays host to the Tbilisi Photo and Multimedia Museum, which draws much of its material from the Tbilisi Photo Festival's expansive archives.

The city expertly fuses its ancient heritage with new buildings. For a look at the city’s history, take the cable car from Rike Park up to Narikala Fortress, an ancient citadel that dates back to the fourth century, and offers a prime lookout. Only slightly newer is Anchiskhati Basilica, a sixth-century Georgian Orthodox Church, which is home to a renowned local choir.

For the best shopping, head to Dry Bridge Market, a popular flea market, where locals sell Soviet-era trinkets and traditional local clothes.

After a full day of walking, head for the sulphur baths, which are offered as private baths or communal baths and are an excellent way to soak up the local scene.

Local restaurants

Set in a converted chouse, Shavi Lomi (The Black Lion) in Sololaki specialises in contemporary takes on classic Georgian dishes in a room with vaulted ceilings. You can still see dangling meat hooks in the converted butcher shop that is now Barbarestan, one of the city's most popular restaurants. Inspired by classic Georgian cuisine, the menu features seasonal salads and bright soups and stews.

Local cafés

An artsy haven in Sololaki, Cafe Linville has a setting almost as appealing as its food, with bold wallpaper and eye-catching art that feels like a contemporary salon. Opt for light salads and toasts with jam to pair with iced coffee.

Local bars

Georgians have made wine for 8,000 years, and many local winemakers still follow traditional methods. Try Saperavi for red. The natural process yields many funky orange wines, too. Tbilisi has an up-and-coming wine scene, with exceptional natural wines. Nab a taste at Vino Underground, in Sololaki, a local favourite.

Reviews

Photos Stamba Hotel reviews
Rosa Rankin-Gee

Anonymous review

By Rosa Rankin-Gee, Parisian script tease

Put it on my tombstone: the world would be a better place if the world was like Tbilisi airport. In fact, if the world were like Tbilisi, but let’s start with customs. 

It’s past 2am, and at a risk of being too flattering to ourselves, Mrs Smith and I look like extras from The Walking Dead. Still, instead of the icy interrogation seemingly obligatory in the rest of the world, we receive the warmest of hellos, and then – drum roll – the customs officer brings out two mini bottles of wine. Wine. We look up. There are boxes stacked behind her; wine for everyone who comes through. Welcome to Georgia, she says, and she waves us in.

It is astounding the chemical reaction of complimentary wine at a border. You don’t even need to open it to feel the effect. We are euphoric. Mrs Smith keeps squeezing my hand. All this could sound a little twee. But it isn’t. TL;DR: over the course of two days, I text several friends this thoughtful and considered summary: Tbilisi is really fucking cool. 

And nowhere is the intersection of oven-hot Georgian generosity and ice-cool Georgian style more present than in Hotel Stamba, an extraordinary feat of scale and imagination housed in the skeleton of a former Soviet publishing house, on Tbilisi’s Kostava Street. 

We enter under exposed bulbs that bring to mind a starlet’s mirror. They call it an atrium but that word doesn’t come close: a six-story criss-cross of mammoth exposed concrete beams, with exotic greenery and sky-touching trees growing up from the basement. Instead of walls, bookshelves to a scale that makes one think the hotel might be single-handedly keeping the publishing industry alive. And laced through the concrete, high above our heads, are the conveyor belts that once moved communist newspapers through the various stages of printing.
 
A bellboy in a ruby-red uniform escorts us to our room. When we get there, I attempt to film the reaction shot on my phone. One, this is horrifically cheesy, like some kind of ill-fated gender reveal. Two, it was pointless: for the whole 60 seconds, Mrs Smith was entirely speechless. 

Sometimes, the ability to speak just flies like a bird out the window. It helps if that window runs the full corner-to-corner of one wall, is surrounded by exposed brick, and looks out at a neon-lit radio tower in the courtyard. The ceiling height is 3-4 Mrs Smiths. There are chandeliers made of polished horn.  Sitting atop red enamel tiles is a freestanding brass bateau bath, and beyond it, ‘La Cage’: an 8ft-tall wraparound shower inspired by a 19th-century French original. Two hundred jets come at you from every angle. There’s a mini-bar and a maxi bar, a DIY mixology corner decked out with full-size bottles. There’s a bed big enough to pitch a marquee on, and something I didn’t know I loved until precisely that moment: foot-kissing milk-white carpets. 

At its best, a hotel feels like something a home could never be – beyond, better. Details so decadent you almost want to laugh. This is that. Chocolates made in-house from cocoa-bean trees in Kakheti wait like Class-A drugs on an antique mirror coffee table. Bath salts call our name from a huge glass apothecary jar. A baby blue mini Marzocco espresso maker and house-roasted beans sit on a wooden countertop,  and an accidental M theme emerges, with Margiela toiletries (and mini Marvis for your teeth) and a speaker system by cult audiophiles McIntosh. 

Another thing that doesn’t always happen in hotels: you feel like you could pass away a day in the room happily. A year even. Don’t, though. In this case, it’s worth slipping out into the world. Tbilisi thrums with a mix-n-match of every kind of cool. Art nouveau sidles into Sputnik-esque TV towers, and grapevines hang through gardens instead of washing. Taxis smell of jasmine, verandas in the old town feel like they’re asking for your hand in marriage, and at Dry Bridge market, fresh-pomegranate-juice stalls fuel your treasure hunt through walls of hand-woven rugs, dusty chandeliers and Soviet tchotchkes. 

And that’s before you’ve even had a bite to eat. Georgian food is call-your-work-and-tell-them-you’re-never-coming-home superb: herbaceous, cheese-laden, hyper-savoury, tangy sweet. And there’s nowhere better to sample its delights than at the hotel’s very own Cafe Stamba, a Wes Anderson-meets-Mondrian darling of Tbilisi’s fashion and art kids, replete with Vetements wardrobes and facial tattoos.  

Stamba plays its hand as cool as these kids play theirs. In a way – a great way – it’s like someone mysterious on a first date. It won’t just blurt everything out, so ask it questions, test its limits. Walk the marathon to the hidden depths of the lobby bar. Work out that Cafe Stamba also houses a secret Ramen bar and a wunderkammer wine shop. Follow the glow to the vertical farm, home to edible flowers, Swiss chard, kale, berries and lit up like a nightclub for plants. Walk through the music-video-ready underground carpark to visit Stamba’s conjoined sister hotel Rooms, which is lit low enough to make it feel like you’re having an affair even if you’re sitting opposite your own partner.

Apologies to Mrs Smith, but it was actually back home at Stamba’s chandelier-crowned Pink Bar that I really fell in love. With a cocktail so mesmerising I had an ocean of it: the Black Sea. Bourbon, mezcal, corn-infused agave, lime, salt water. On the last night, I agreed to open things up. We brought two back home upstairs to our golden bathtub. We walked incredibly slowly because we didn’t want to spill a drop. We walked incredibly slowly because in some way we felt we might trick the space-time continuum and not have to leave. The next morning as the nose of our plane lifted off the runway, it turned out physics still applied to us; we’d just have to do everything in our physical power to go back.

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Price per night from $200.00