I tried something called 'sound therapy', which involved lying on the floor of my room while a friendly Nordic woman made noises using a gong and what looked like a giant tuning fork. Instead, there’s an array of spiritual treatments to “ensure you stay beyond yourself and awaken your soul”. They do things differently here, so don’t expect anything as dull as a massage or manicure. The young waiting staff in the restaurant were a little unpolished, but the hotel’s long closure – I visited in the summer, just after lockdown 1.0 – offered mitigating circumstances. If the inside of the hotel is the murky depths of the deep sea, stepping outside is like coming up for air. Providing a counterbalance to the moody interior is ‘Jurema’, the fabulously leafy interior terrace, arranged over three stories, surrounded by living walls of jasmine and passion flower, and a perfect place to drink and dine when weather allows. Even the sinks in the public loos are worth lingering over. The eccentric private art collection of Lebanese-born owner Rami Fustok, who reportedly dropped £45m creating the Mandrake out of a nondescript office block back in 2017, enlivens every corner, and there are contributions by Salvador Dali, Francesco Clemente and Jonas Burgert. The dimly lit lobby, with its black floors, plum velvet sofas and faux-Renaissance paintings, sets the tone, but delve deeper into the bowels of the beast and you’ll find even darker corners, including the stuffed creations of some deranged zookeeper – an ostrich/alligator in the restaurant, an impala/peacock behind the bar, and – down in the basement – a nightmarish mural redolent of Hieronymus Bosch. Sick of London’s army of beige and uninspiring contemporary hotels? Don’t fancy the fustiness of a Mayfair Grande Dame? The Mandrake is the antithesis of these, a curious cross between Mad Max and the court of Queen Anne that seems to have taken to heart the motto of Christopher Hitchens: “The one unforgivable sin is to be boring.”
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