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Tótem Madrid
Madrid, Spain · Independent · Near Luxury
A nineteenth-century Salamanca town house on the corner of Hermosilla and Lagasca, built when the district was laid out for the aristocracy, and the parts that matter are legally untouchable: the facade, the balconies, the railings and the wooden staircase that now stands in the lobby. Gerardo Mingo cut the count from 67 rooms to 64 in 2016 to fit in suites, and the Barcelona studio Corium finished them in oak, brass and black marble, with a different colour of old plaster moulding on every floor. El Pimiento Verde cooks Basque downstairs.
- 64 rooms
- Opened 2016
- Neighborhood: Salamanca
- Architect: Gerardo Mingo (2016 refurbishment)
- Interiors: Corium (Nori Furlan and Paco Llonch)
About Tótem Madrid
- The hotel opened in 2016 with a restaurant and cocktail bar called Hermosos y Malditos, named for Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned. The Basque kitchen El Pimiento Verde has the room now.
- The minibars read like a local shopping list: La Azucena crisps and Matías López chocolates, both made nearby, with toiletries from the small Madrid house Handmade Beauty.
- It was a private home until the middle of the twentieth century and has been a hotel since the 1960s, running as the Hesperia Hermosilla before the relaunch.
- The 64 rooms climb five floors around a central courtyard where the lounge sits, and the junior suites take the corner of the building with three windows each.
- Marugal runs it as its second Madrid house after Urso, alongside Cap Rocat in Mallorca, Torralbenc in Menorca and Viura in the Rioja Alavesa.
History
Tótem occupies a five-storey neoclassical house at Calle de Hermosilla 23, on the corner of Lagasca, built in the nineteenth century as one of the aristocratic residences that filled the new Salamanca grid. It has Juliet balconies on almost every level and the tall first-floor ceilings of the old salons, and its facade, stairway, railings and balconies are all protected under Spanish heritage law. The house stayed a private residence until the middle of the twentieth century, then became a hotel in the 1960s, latterly the Hesperia Hermosilla.
Marugal, the Spanish group behind Urso in Madrid, Cap Rocat in Mallorca, Torralbenc in Menorca and Viura in the Rioja Alavesa, relaunched it as Tótem in June 2016, its second house in the capital. The architect Gerardo Mingo reworked the building and cut the room count from 67 to 64 so that suites could be fitted in, and enlarged the small windows of the restaurant to open up the street views. The Barcelona studio Corium, Nori Furlan and Paco Llonch, who also did Alma Barcelona and Alma Pamplona, handled the interiors: they kept the original pine staircase and the plaster ceiling mouldings, giving each floor its own colour, and set them against oak, brass, and black marble floors and walls in the bathrooms. Large mirrors, upholstered headboards, grey corner sofas and abstract sculptural paintings by Yaya Mur fill the rooms.
The 64 rooms and suites are arranged over five floors around the central courtyard, where the lounge sits: fourteen Tótem doubles, thirty-six deluxe exterior rooms along the Hermosilla and Lagasca fronts, seven attic rooms under the sloping top floor, four junior suites on the corner with three windows each, and three suites. The bar opened as Hermosos y Malditos, a concept named after Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned that ran across both the restaurant and the lounge cocktail bar; the Basque restaurant El Pimiento Verde holds the dining room today.
The setting
The Barrio de Salamanca was laid out from the mid-1800s on a strict grid for the aristocracy and the new moneyed classes, and it has stayed Madrid's most expensive quarter ever since. Hermosilla runs tree-lined through the middle of it, a couple of streets from the Golden Mile shopping along Serrano and Ortega y Gasset, and a short walk from the Michelin dining and the terraces of Jorge Juan and Claudio Coello. The Retiro is a few minutes east, the Paseo de la Castellana a few minutes west, and Velázquez and Serrano metro stations sit at either end of the street.
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