Amid war, a lavish hotel will open in Britain’s Old War Office

From his office at No. 10 Downing St., Prime Miner Boris Johnson of Britain places urgent daily calls to Ukraine’s wartime leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Next door, in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, officials draw up new sanctions against the Russian oligarchs who have turned London into a turnkey haven to hide their assets and house their extended families.

Yet just across Whitehall, a billionaire property developer is close to completing an extravagant conversion of the Old War Office, an Edwardian-era monument to Britain’s imperial past. The new property will be a five-star Raffles Hotel, with lavish residential apartments that would until recently have catered to the same ultrawealthy Russians who have abruptly fallen out of favor.
“We had a glut of Russian inquiries about six weeks ago, none of which materialized,” said Charlie Walsh, head of residential sales for the project. “The Russian market would have been quite significant. For obvious reasons, that has been completely nonexent. Thankfully, from that point of view, as well.”
The Admiralty Arch, which is being turned into a Waldorf Astoria, in London, March 23, 2022. For critics, private takeovers of public buildings have gone too far in the city, particularly in the case of Admiralty Arch, a majestic edifice that has languished for years as a construction site, blighting the view toward Buckingham Palace. (Mary Turner/The New York Times)
To say the project has strange timing understates its sheer incongruity. Opening at a time of war in Europe, the OWO — as the Old War Office has been delicately rebranded — is an evocative reminder of Britain’s wartime hory. In the midst of a crackdown on rampant foreign money, it is also a baroque example of what postwar Britain has become and what the government is belatedly trying to clean up.
Rarely has a building been both so emblematic and yet so out of step with the times — a bricks-and-mortar manifestation of how London has, and hasn’t, changed.
The crosscurrents are not lost on Walsh, who works for the Hinduja Group, an Anglo-Indian conglomerate controlled the Hinduja brothers, which has holdings in automotive manufacturing, oil and gas, and health care. He is trying to sell the building’s rich hory to a superrich clientele without overdoing the warlike theme.
Instead, Walsh recalls the famous figures who worked in the Old War Office, from Winston Churchill to T.E. Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia. He confides that John Profumo, secretary of state for war in the early 1960s, entertained his 19-year-old lover Chrine Keeler in his wood-paneled office, which will be the centerpiece of a hotel suite. Their fling exploded into the “Profumo affair” after it emerged that Keeler had also had a sexual relationship with a Soviet diplomat.
Ian Fleming was in and out of the building during his time as a naval intelligence officer — a detail that is catnip to a salesman like Walsh, who hints that Fleming came up with the inspiration for his suave spy, James Bond, there. He shows a visitor the “Spies Entrance,” so-called because it is tucked discreetly at the rear of the building.
Numerous Bond films have used the Old War Office as a backdrop, most memorably at the end of the 2012 film “Skyfall,” when a brooding Daniel Craig gazes at its domed turrets from the roof of a neighboring building — Big Ben looming in the dance, framed fluttering Union Jacks.
“Hate to waste a view,” Bond says, in words the developer has manifestly taken to heart.
The OWO is full of jaw-dropping vas, with suites that look out to the Horse Guards Parade across the street or south to the Houses of Parliament. There is a three-story Champagne bar overlooking a courtyard and a glass-roofed restaurant. Two of the penthouse apartments have rooms built into the turrets.
All that splendor — the wood paneling, the intricately carved marble fireplaces, the original mosaic floors — isn’t cheap. The 85 apartments start at 5.8 million pounds ($7.6 million) and go up to 100 million pounds ($131 million). Walsh has sold about one-quarter of the units and said he was confident he would sell half the time the OWO opens at the end of this year or early in 2023.
Though he does not say so explicitly, Walsh is clearly relieved that Russian buyers have been sidelined. The threat of sanctions, which could lead to their assets being frozen, spares him a difficult choice. He inss that more stringent “know your customer” regulations in the last few years have made it “nigh on impossible for dirty money to come into these new projects.”

That seems optimic: Transparency International, which campaigns against corruption, estimates that 6.7 billion pounds ($8.8 billion) of dubious foreign funds have poured into British property since 2016, including 1.5 billion pounds from Russians accused of corruption or links to the Kremlin. A new law aims to make it harder for wealthy foreigners to disguise their ownership of real estate or use it to launder money.
Despite this crackdown, and the complications of Brexit, Walsh predicted that London would remain an alluring destination for the superrich. Two years of pandemic — of “not being able to exercise their retail therapy,” he said — had generated pent-up demand for multithousand-dollar-a-night hotel rooms and multimillion-dollar apartments.
For critics, private takeovers of public buildings have gone too far in the city. (Mary Turner/The New York Times)
The Old War Office, which was completed in 1906, is not the only London landmark that is being converted into a luxury hotel. The Admiralty Arch, which sits between Trafalgar Square and The Mall, is being turned into a Waldorf Astoria. The former U.S. Embassy on Grosvenor Square, a midcentury-modern classic designed Earo Saarinen, is being converted into a Rosewood Hotel.
For critics, private takeovers of public buildings have gone too far, particularly in the case of Admiralty Arch, a majestic edifice that has languished for years as a construction site, blighting the view toward Buckingham Palace.
“It’s an absolute scandal,” said Simon Jenkins, a column for the Guardian and author of “A Short Hory of London.” “It should be used for government offices. Are they going to do Downing Street next?” (A smart-aleck might note that the prime miner’s residence was regularly used as a party space during the pandemic — a violation of lockdown rules that has put Johnson into political peril).
Selling off dinguished public buildings for hotels or high-end apartments would be hard to imagine in a city like Paris. But in London, “a dispassionate approach to the great buildings of state is not as strange as it would seem,” said Tony Travers, an expert in urban affairs at the London School of Economics.

“Britain, which is a very traditional country in many ways, has the capacity to be very untraditional in other ways,” he said. “There’s a willingness to reject tradition when it is seen as pragmatically necessary.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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