HotelChatter

Room Reaction
We went round a selection of rooms, and are pleased to report for the fretters among you that there doesn’t seem to be much difference between them – this place was a hotel before (if a cheap n grubby one) so the rooms are pretty much uniform. If you like your light natural, you might be best off on the first floor, where the windows are floor-to-ceiling. From the second up, they’re normal window-sized windows, although on the top floor, the rooms seem a bit smaller because of the roof curve.

Like other Indigos, the hotel design is riffing on the Fibonacci mathematical sequence. Knowing this will save you wondering why there’s a framed shell on every wall (it’s showing that maths can be beautiful, apparently), random numbers going up the stairs, and stuccoed rectangles on the ceilings of the bedrooms (something to do with ideal proportions). Even the coffee tables and trays have been designed in line with the sequence, they say. Which is neat – it’s just a shame they don’t have any kind of literature in the rooms saying this. They say there are notices around the building, but we didn’t see any.

Back to the rooms. All of them have a king-sized bed on sizeable legs that makes it nice and high (70cm high). We only lay down for a second, but they seemed like they were a pretty good mesh of soft but supportive (we’d have liked to have stayed longer). Liked the headboards too – leather, ribbed and padded.

Rooms are colour coded by their floor – blue, pink, red and green – so you get a carpet, bedspread and cushions in your floor’s colour. Then there are photos of local details like signposts on the walls (these are mostly the same, whichever room you choose), and the wall behind each bed has been printed with a massive picture of a local landmark. Then each has a minimum 32in flatscreen TV (we saw one of 42in), desk, and some have chaise lounges.

The bathrooms keep the colour coding, and have raindance showers and a generous stash of Aveda products, with bigger bottles than the norm. They’re nice.

In fact, the only major problem with the rooms is their size. As we said, the building was a hotel before, so Indigo didn’t have a vast amount of scope, but surely they could have knocked out a couple of walls to space things out a bit? These rooms are seriously small, especially for American tastes – even in the bigger ones, there’s not much space either side of the bed, and not much empty floor once you account for the desk and chaise lounge. if you’re traveling with a big suitcase or more, you will feel seriously cramped.

What We Liked
The decor – especially the corridors with stripy carpet, blue skies on the ceiling and local photos on the walls – a lot. The restaurant/café downstairs managed to be funky and cosy with the help of stripy armchairs and a real fire burning in what looked like a television set. In fact, the restaurant’s really something for Indigo to trumpet about – all their food is sourced locally from within the M25 motorway (which means Heathrow inwards, and that's pretty rare by London standards), the meat’s organic and they serve up fantastic cakes (we can vouch for them) from a local bakery. Contrary to other Indigos, you eat breakfast down here, not in your room, but that can only be a good thing as far as we can see. Oh, and there’s free wifi, which is always good.

What We Didn’t Like
No amount of funky feature wall is going to disguise the fact that the rooms are weeny. Compared to those giant twin rooms you get in the US, these are shoe cupboards. Some of the rooms have terraces, which seems like a nice idea, but they’re closed in by high fencing, which makes them, A) viewless, and B) a bit claustrophobic. Finally, there’s not much of a scene round Paddington, so you won’t be in the thick of London – but spend five minutes on a bus and you will be, which you can’t really complain about.

Bottom Line
Cute rooms despite the size. But given that prices start at just £125, it’s no wonder that they’re already running at 80% capacity. Do come here, just pack light.