Six Senses London opened on 1 March 2026, bringing the IHG-owned wellness hotel brand to the UK for the first time. The property occupies a quarter of The Whiteley — the former Edwardian department store on Queensway in Bayswater that has been reimagined through a £1.5 billion redevelopment led by Foster + Partners — and represents one of the most anticipated hotel openings in London in several years.
The address puts the hotel within comfortable walking distance of Hyde Park and Notting Hill, a position that makes sense for a brand whose guest profile skews towards internationally mobile, wellness-conscious travellers rather than corporate or transient city trade.
The property
Six Senses London occupies 109 bedrooms and suites, many with private terraces, alongside 14 branded residences. Interiors were designed by AvroKO in collaboration with EPR Architects — a brief that balanced the building's Art Deco bones with the brand's characteristic warm, earthy material palette. The Whiteley Suite, at 125 square metres with its own roof terrace, can be configured as an entire private floor.
Design detailing draws on the building's heritage: inky blues, warm woods and bold geometric forms carry through the public spaces and rooms, softened with the biophilic elements that have become a Six Senses signature.
The spa — the commercial centrepiece
At 2,300 square metres, the wellness facility at Six Senses London is significant even by the brand's standards. The offering includes a magnesium pool, a 20-metre indoor swimming pool, a 325-square-metre fitness centre and thirteen dedicated wellness spaces alongside six treatment rooms. The modalities available range from cryotherapy and flotation to red-light therapies, a traditional hammam, and a sensory suite.
The Biohack Recovery Lounge positions Six Senses London at the more clinical end of the luxury wellness spectrum, offering PEMF therapy, sound loungers, compression boots, lymphatic suits, electro muscle stimulation, vibration platforms and inversion tables — a setup that will resonate with the performance-focused wellness consumer that has driven much of the sector's premium growth over the past five years.
Six Senses Place
The hotel opens with Six Senses Place, the brand's first private members' club globally. The concept sits naturally within the broader Whiteley development, which also includes luxury residences, retail and dining — creating a mixed-use environment in which the hotel operates as the wellness and hospitality anchor rather than a standalone destination.
Dining
Whiteley's Kitchen, Bar and Café focuses on modern British cooking — a deliberate choice to establish a sense of place rather than import the globally generic menus that characterise many international luxury hotel openings. Six Senses has built its reputation on food programmes that reflect local provenance and seasonal availability; the London opening appears consistent with that positioning.
The wider context
Six Senses London's opening adds to a significant pipeline of luxury hotel activity in the capital in 2026. The Waldorf Astoria at Admiralty Arch is due to open in Q2, and the St Regis continues its Mayfair fit-out. For the IHG portfolio, the UK debut of Six Senses represents a meaningful step in positioning the brand alongside the leading wellness-led luxury operators in the European market — a category where demand has consistently outpaced supply since 2022.
Whether a 109-room property in Bayswater — a neighbourhood that sits slightly outside London's traditional luxury hotel corridors of Mayfair, Belgravia and Knightsbridge — can command the room rates the brand's operating economics require will be one of the more closely watched hospitality stories of 2026.