Asaya at The Chancery Rosewood

The one thing

Dr Wassim Taktouk's clinic has come out of Knightsbridge for the first time and taken a room inside this spa, so the protocols that made his name are now available somewhere you can also swim twenty five metres and lie on a warm marble bench afterwards. Rosewood calls it the first hotel based clinic of its kind, and whatever else that phrase is doing, the practical effect is unusual and worth knowing about.

The verdict

Eero Saarinen finished this building in 1960 as the United States Embassy, and for sixty years it was the least welcoming address on Grosvenor Square, a diagrid of Portland stone and precast concrete with a gilded eagle over the door and a police presence underneath it. Theodore Roszak made the eagle out of aluminium salvaged from a B52, eleven metres from wingtip to wingtip, and it is still up there. Sir David Chipperfield spent years turning the rest of it into a hotel, which opened on the first of September 2025, and the Grade II listing meant the outside had to stay recognisably Saarinen's while everything behind it changed.

The spa lives entirely below ground, which sounds like a compromise and is closer to the opposite. Yabu Pushelberg had 1,119 square metres and no windows to work with, and rather than fake daylight they leaned the other way, so the hallways narrow as you go in, the light drops, and the walls turn to blue upholstery that swallows sound before it can travel. George Yabu described the intention as breaking from the usual spa vernacular in favour of a language rooted in permanence and place, and the material list bears that out, being wood panelling and custom stone rather than the pale limestone and orchid arrangement of every other hotel spa in W1.

Glenn Pushelberg's phrase for it is a series of gracious spaces with the warmth and rhythm of a fine English home, and the part of that which lands is the sense of belonging rather than formality. Nobody is stationed to greet you with a scented towel and a script. What the house does instead is ask, plainly and in writing, that phones are silenced and that silence, peace and respect are treated as part of the philosophy, and it is a mobile phone, camera and smoke free zone throughout.

The scale is small. Five treatment rooms, one of them the couples suite, which puts this at the intimate end of Mayfair rather than the destination end, and the day pass runs to three hours rather than a whole day. Read together with the twenty five metre pool, that tells you what kind of visit this is: a properly considered half day built around water and one very good treatment, not an afternoon of wandering between cabins.

The other thing worth saying is that Asaya arrived in London late and knew it. The Connaught, the Emory, the Lanesborough and the Peninsula were all already here. What The Chancery Rosewood brought that none of them could was the building, and it is unrepeatable.

The water

The pool is twenty five metres, which is enough to actually swim rather than to turn around in, and it is the only dimension the property publishes anywhere. It sits at the bottom of the spa with the vitality pool beside it, and the heated marble loungers are the detail people remember, warm stone against the length of the back, which does more for a tired body than most treatments costing three figures.

The heat is short and the house does not pretend otherwise, being a sauna and a steam room and nothing further. There is no hammam and no salt room, so anyone arriving with a long thermal circuit in mind will find the shape of the afternoon smaller than they hoped. What balances it is the cold, because there is a proper ice bath here, published variously as a plunge pool and a cold plunge, and the sequence the designers describe runs arrival and lounge, then treatment, then the pool, then a hydrotherapy zone holding the sauna, the steam room, the heated stone chairs and the thermal water.

Everything is below ground and there is no daylight anywhere in it, which is worth knowing rather than worrying about. The one piece of water you cannot reach on any ordinary booking is the jacuzzi, which sits inside the Private Couples Suite and belongs to that reservation alone.

Treatments

EviDenS de Beauté leads the menu and has built the house facials around it, including a sculpting facial made with a tool exclusive to this address, and the signature work runs long, at ninety, a hundred and fifty and in one case a hundred and eighty minutes. Moods brings NeuroFusion massage, which is exclusive in London to this site and comes in named moods rather than named techniques, so you choose Chill or Hustle or Nurture and the therapist builds from there. L'Atelier Green does the nails with a collection made for the hotel.

Then there is the clinic, which is the reason a lot of people will come. Dr Wassim Taktouk practises in cosmetic dermatology and until now his protocols were only available at his own Knightsbridge rooms, so having them resident inside a hotel spa is genuinely new. The published menu runs from a consultation at £195 through injectables, Profhilo, polynucleotides and mesotherapy, into Ultherapy Prime and Thermage FLX at the top, and an intravenous drip that follows a medical consultation and an optional blood test. It sits alongside the spa rather than replacing it, so a facial and a filler are booked from the same desk, which suits some people enormously and will put others off entirely.

Mothers to be are looked after, with a ninety minute prenatal massage on the menu and treatments written for expectant and nursing women. On the fitness side Matt Roberts runs the training, with a Styku body scan, a hundred and fifty minute health screening and blocks of personal sessions, and the gym itself debuts Technogym's Artis Luxury range and what the property says is the first Technogym reformer Pilates bed. That gym, though, is for hotel guests only.

Getting in

Anyone can book here. Treatments go through the spa's own booking engine without a login, or by telephone on +44 20 7889 7000, or by email, and hotel guests dial 40285 from the room. The Wellness Day Experience Pass is £250 Monday to Thursday and £300 Friday to Sunday, giving up to three hours of the facilities, the pool, the vitality pool, the heated marble lounger, the steam room and the sauna, and it carries no requirement to be staying. The gym is the one thing it does not include, at any price.

The rule that catches people is treatment length. A booking of a hundred and twenty minutes or more carries an hour of the pool, steam room and sauna with it on the day, and anything shorter does not, so an hour of massage needs the pass alongside it if the water matters. The Private Couples Suite is the other route in, at £1,100 Monday to Thursday and £1,300 Friday to Sunday for two, which folds in a ninety minute massage each, an hour of the suite with its jacuzzi, a fruit platter with two glasses of champagne or sparkling tea, and two hours of the facilities.

The spa runs from half past seven in the morning until nine at night, with treatments between ten and half past seven. Everything is over 18s, including the changing rooms and the thermal floor, and the single exception is the pool, where children of hotel guests may swim with an adult between half past eight and half past ten in the morning and between four and five in the afternoon. Arrive fifteen to thirty minutes early, because there is a wellbeing consultation before anything starts. Cancelling inside twenty four hours is charged in full, two hours for a same day booking. Bond Street is a published five minute walk, on the Elizabeth, Jubilee and Central lines. The whole spa is below ground and reached by lift, so do call ahead if step free access matters to you.

What to know before you fall in love

• The heat is short, a sauna and a steam room, with no hammam and no salt room, so the circuit here is about water rather than a long thermal journey.
• The whole spa is below ground with no windows and no outdoor space at all.
• A treatment has to run to a hundred and twenty minutes to carry the pool, steam room and sauna with it, and even then for one hour only.
• The gym is open to hotel guests alone, so it sits outside the day pass at any price.
• The day pass is capped at three hours, which makes this an afternoon rather than a whole day.

Best for

Couples, who are unusually well served by the suite with its own jacuzzi and the two hours of water that come with it. Anyone who wants a serious swim in Mayfair, since twenty five metres is rare this side of Hyde Park. And anyone who has been meaning to see Dr Taktouk and would rather do it somewhere with a pool at the end of it.