A roadside hotel with a better side to it
The hotel stands at 764 Great West Road in Isleworth, a Tudor style building set a little back from the dual carriageway, with a bar, a restaurant and its own car park at the front. It has around seventy rooms and it is a practical roadside hotel rather than anywhere grand. Nobody should book it expecting a country house, and nobody who has stayed there would describe it as one.
It earns a guide of its own for one reason that most of its guests miss entirely. Behind the building there is a garden. People arrive by car, park at the front, walk straight in from the traffic and never once look out of the back. On a warm evening that garden is the quietest place for a drink within a good walk of the Great West Road, which on this stretch is not a crowded category.
The garden, and the rooms on that side
The building has, in effect, two faces. One looks at the A4, which carries traffic through the night and has a rhythm of lorries all of its own. The other looks back over the garden, and the difference between the two is the difference between hearing the road and forgetting it is there.
Iris does not pretend to know the number of every quiet room in the building, and room layouts change with every refurbishment. What any guest can do is ask, clearly and when booking rather than at the desk, for a room at the back, away from the Great West Road, and say that it matters. Ask again on arrival. If the answer is that only road facing rooms are left, it is better to know before the evening than to discover it at eleven with the window open.
Aircraft are part of life anywhere in TW7 and the back of the building does not change that. But the road is the bigger noise here, and a room on the garden side takes most of it away.
How near the park really is
The name promises more closeness than the map delivers. Osterley Park, the National Trust estate, lies to the north of the Great West Road, and the hotel is roughly a mile from it by the usual measures. The way in is through the residential streets beyond the main road, up towards Jersey Road, and it is a pleasant enough walk of twenty minutes or more to the grounds, longer to the house itself.
The house is worth the effort. It began as a Tudor mansion built for Sir Thomas Gresham and was remodelled in the eighteenth century by Robert Adam for the Child family, the bankers, whose interiors are what people come to see. Horace Walpole called the finished house the palace of palaces. The grounds hold lakes, a long drive, a walled garden and a great deal of open grass, and they are at their best in the last couple of hours of an afternoon. Opening times shift through the year; look them up on the day rather than relying on memory.
For a drink near the park rather than in it, the Hare and Hounds on Windmill Lane, an Edwardian pub of 1904 on the eastern side of the estate, has a very large garden of its own and makes a good halfway point between the grounds and the hotel.
Getting there, and the Great West Road side of TW7
By train, the hotel sits between stations rather than beside one. Osterley on the Piccadilly line is about a quarter of an hour's walk along the Great West Road, and Syon Lane and Isleworth, both on the Waterloo line, are each a little over ten minutes away. By car it is easy, which is how most of its guests arrive, and the terminals at Heathrow are around six miles to the west.
This stretch of the A4 was once lined with the factories that gave it the name the Golden Mile, and a few of the great frontages survive, including the Gillette building's clock tower at the corner of Syon Lane. After dark the road is more interesting to look at than to walk along. For dinner, the riverside at Isleworth and the canal side of Brentford are both a short taxi ride away, and the guide to a working week on the Golden Mile covers the options for anybody staying more than a night.
A companion at this address
This is one of the most common kinds of booking on the line: a companion at your hotel room, for an agreed number of hours. You send the hotel, the name on the room booking, its number and the hour, and that single check happens once. She walks through the lobby the way any guest's visitor does. The hotel has no arrangement with this line, has never been asked for one, and is not a partner of any kind.
If the evening is warm, there is a lot to be said for meeting in the garden first and going up later, and Iris can arrange it that way. Two hours at £500 is what most guests here choose. For anybody with an early flight, the overnight at £1,800 covers ten hours until breakfast and takes trains and midnight taxis out of the question altogether. Whatever the length, she receives the fee from you in person soon after she walks in, quietly, and it is not mentioned again.
Who suits this corner of TW7
Violetta is the obvious name. She is the tallest woman on the list, slender and composed, anchored in Isleworth, and the quiet corner of a hotel garden off the Great West Road is more or less her natural habitat; she prefers long bookings and overnights. Vanessa, based on Windmill Lane a minute from Osterley station, likes garden evenings followed by dinner and asks the kind of questions that make an ordinary hotel bar feel like somewhere better.
Laura walks the Osterley grounds most weeks and suits an afternoon start: the park first while it is open, a drink in a garden, then the evening. All three appear on the slender page, and between them they cover Osterley, Isleworth and the stretch of road that joins them.
Filed under: most of the names in this note also sit on the brunettes shortlist in the panel.