150 Piccadilly, opened 24 May 1906, architects Charles Mewès and Arthur Davis, developed by César Ritz — a steel-framed building with a private bathroom in every room, 111 rooms and 23 suites. The English adjective ritzy comes from this house, and the irony is that it means showy while the innovations were plumbing, wiring and staff discipline. It is the third and last house of one career: Ritz had collapsed in 1902 and was largely absent from it.
The house
Mewès had designed the interiors of the Ritz Paris eight years earlier. The Piccadilly building applied the same proposition to a new structural technology — a steel frame, unusual in London at the time, behind a Parisian façade.
The Barclay brothers held it from 1995. In March 2020 the hotel closed for the first time since it opened in 1906, and was sold that month to Abdulhadi Mana Al-Hajri, a Qatari businessman and brother-in-law of the ruling family, for a figure reported as just under $1bn and elsewhere as under £800m ⚑, amid a family dispute over the price.
What distinguishes it
The word entered the language here. Ritzy is one of very few English adjectives taken from a hotel. It means ostentatious, and the house’s actual contributions were a private bathroom in every room, electric light and a trained brigade. The language kept the surface and lost the engineering.
It is one man’s third house and he was not there. Savoy 1889, Ritz Paris 1898, Ritz London 1906 — and Ritz collapsed in 1902, four years before this one opened, never fully returning to work. His entire active career runs thirteen years; he lived another sixteen and built nothing.
It did not close for a century and a half of crises. Two world wars, the Blitz, the Depression, three recessions. The first closure in the building’s history came in March 2020, and the sale followed within the month.
The architects are the Paris architects. Mewès designed the Ritz Paris interiors in 1897–98 and this building with Davis. The two houses are the same hand eight years apart.
The Ritz London is a formal house and says so: it maintains a dress code in its public rooms and the Palm Court tea is a scheduled performance rather than a quiet corner. A guest who wants an unobtrusive modern hotel will find the opposite, and the Piccadilly frontage means traffic on one side of the building.
Signature rooms and dates
Competitive landscape
Editorial note — The 24 May 1906 opening, Mewès and Davis, the room count, the Barclay ownership from 1995 and the March 2020 closure and sale checked against corporate and press accounts; verified August 2026. ⚑ The sale price is reported as just under $1bn and as under £800m and the register carries both.
Sources
What the entry rests on. Each reference records the specific facts it supports, so a disputed line can be traced to the account it came from.