London Fashion Week runs through Monday. The Connaught went into it three days after Paris named it No. 49 in The 50 Best Hotels 2026, and the calmest room in the building is the one under the lobby: a pool, a granite wall with water running down it, and a door that opens only to guests and members.
Carlos Place is short and curved and mostly quiet. This week the quiet is relative. Cars idle at the kerb from breakfast onwards, and the lobby, all Edwardian mahogany and that famous staircase, fills with people carrying garment bags who have somewhere to be by ten. Go past reception and down. The noise stops on the stairs.
What you reach is Aman Spa at The Connaught, the first Aman spa ever built outside one of the group's own resorts, and still its only address in Britain. It opened in 2008 with the hotel's rebuild. Cool granite and white marble, honey-gold oak, dove-grey Portland stone; linen, cotton, bamboo, burnished pewter for everything you touch. Aman later took the same idea to Tokyo and New York and called it an urban hotel. Here they only needed a basement.
Sixty square metres
The pool is 60 square metres and 1.2 metres deep, which is to say it is for swimming slowly and floating, and for nothing else. Water falls down a granite wall into it and that is the soundtrack. Four loungers face the pool under a screen of vertical light, and the room reads like the photograph, which is rarer than it should be. There is a steam room off it. The fitness studio runs Technogym Artis machines and free weights, and membership numbers are deliberately capped so the floor never feels busy.
Every treatment begins the same way, with a foot bath and a consultation, a robe and slippers, and a herbal infusion while the therapist works out what you actually need rather than what you booked. Five treatment rooms have their own dressing areas and showers. The couples' room, teak doors and pierced timber screens, has a bath at the back behind a sliding lattice.
The couples’ treatment room, with the bath behind the lattice · Courtesy of Aman
Three pathways
The signature menu is the one Aman runs at every spa it owns, built on the three formulations of its skincare line: Grounding, Purifying and Nourishing. Each offers a massage, a body polish and wrap, a face ritual, and a three-hour Journey that strings all three together. Grounding is the fashion-week order. Amber oil, sandalwood, a Tibetan Ku Nye massage with cupping along the meridians, a Peruvian black mud and amethyst mask on the face, a head massage to close. The brochure lists jet lag, insomnia and the inability to switch off among the things it treats. Ninety minutes, or the full three hours if the last show is done.
Beyond the signature menu the list runs long: acupuncture and tuina, reiki, facial rejuvenation acupuncture, Decorté facials from Japan, holistic massages in half-hour increments up to two hours. Treatments run from nine in the morning to nine at night, and the pool and steam room open at seven, which matters on a morning when the first show is at ten in Shoreditch and the car is at half past eight.
Upstairs the lobby is full of garment bags. Downstairs the only sound is water on granite.
The Splendid EditGuests and members
Access is the thing. The spa is closed to the public; it admits hotel guests and members and nobody else. Memberships come by the month, the quarter or the year, and include the gym and pool, an overnight locker, laundered kit, a set number of personal-training sessions or treatments, guest passes, and ten per cent off anything extra. Family swimming hours are ring-fenced, nine to eleven and three to six, so the lap of the pool at seven belongs to whoever is up.
The rest of the hotel needs little introduction. Hélène Darroze cooks upstairs with three Michelin stars. The Connaught Bar has been making Martinis since 1926. The 50 Best list, announced at Les Salles du Carrousel in Paris on 15 September, put The Connaught at No. 49 alongside Claridge’s at 13 and Raffles London at The OWO at 28, three London hotels in the top fifty and the only ones. The shows close on Monday 21 September. The pool opens at seven on Tuesday as usual.
Spa facilities, treatment menu, hours and membership terms from aman.com and the Aman Spa at The Connaught brochure. Ranking from The 50 Best Hotels 2026 list announced 15 September 2026. London Fashion Week dates from the British Fashion Council schedule.
Photography courtesy of Aman — © Aman, Aman Spa at The Connaught