Keeping Hyde & Seek looking its best
A hotel looks its best on the day it opens. Hyde & Seek has just opened, and our job is to make sure it still looks like that in February.
If you don’t know it, Hyde & Seek is the new name for the Corus Hotel Hyde Park, at 1 Lancaster Gate in Bayswater, straight across the road from the park. It closed in September last year while its owners put £42 million into it. There are 309 rooms, a restaurant and bar, a café called HydeOut under a glass roof and a gym, and the hotel now sits in Marriott’s Tribute Portfolio. The look is Bayswater in the sixties and seventies, and the hotel’s own line for itself is “heritage that misbehaves”.
The name is a joke, and a decent one. Andrew Khoo, who chairs the owners, says the project is about “rejecting the dull and embracing the charm of the location”. Fair enough. The bit we do is a lot less dramatic.
What we look after
Our part is the outside and the glass. On the outside that’s the Victorian frontage and its windows, so facade cleaning and hotel window cleaning in one job. Inside it’s the lobby and its big mirrors and the glass in the public spaces.
It’s what people see first. The entrance and the glass beside it. The lobby and its mirrors. Outside, a Victorian frontage takes traffic, weather and dirt every day, and it shows. Left alone, it does more than show: the dirt wears at the glass, the frames and the finish. So the work is as much about preserving the building as cleaning it.
Then there’s the courtyard. HydeOut sits under a glass roof, so people will spend their mornings looking up through it, and it shows every mark against the sky.
After opening week
The first week is the easy one. Everything is new, the glass is clean and the hotel looks the way it does in the photographs. It’s the weeks after that matter, with a lot of guests, a frontage in central London and an autumn of weather. That’s when a hotel that looked perfect on opening day starts to look lived in, so we’re back every two weeks.
Working around guests
A hotel is a working building with guests in it, and that changes how you clean. It takes discretion and good timing. The lobby glass gets done when it’s quiet, not when people are checking in. Nobody wants equipment in the way at breakfast. You’re polite to everyone you pass, and if a guest is in the way, you wait.
It takes a few visits to learn a building: which glass gets handled all day, where the dirt from the road collects, when the staff would rather you were somewhere else.
Our team works in hotels like this all the time, so good hotel manners come naturally. The staff shouldn’t have to think about us, and neither should the guests.
We’ve done our job when guests don’t give the windows a thought.
Hyde & Seek is open, and we’re glad to be part of it. We work with a fantastic management team to keep the hotel looking its best. If you’re passing Lancaster Gate this autumn, have a look at the windows.
Questions hotels ask us
How often should a hotel’s windows be cleaned?
There’s no single answer, but the glass people see and touch most, like the entrance and the lobby, gets dirty fastest and needs attention more often than the upper floors. For a busy central London hotel, every two weeks or so is a sensible rhythm for the visible glass. You can read more about what we do on our hotel window cleaning page.
Can it be done while guests are in the building?
Yes, and in an open hotel it has to be. It comes down to timing and discretion: quiet times for the busy areas, rooms when they’re empty, and no noise or equipment where people are eating or sleeping. The hotel knows when we’re coming and where we’ll be, so nobody is surprised.
How do you reach the upper windows on a building like this?
It depends on the building. Up to around five storeys, a water-fed pole from the ground often does it. Taller or more awkward frontages need access equipment such as a platform or rope access. We go through the options, and what they do to the price, in our guide to what commercial window cleaning costs in London.
Getting a building ready to open?
Contact Us Today
Whether it is a reopening, a refurbishment or a handover, tell us what your building needs and we will put together a plan that fits it.
- Free Quote
- Satisfaction Guarantee