Venue Review

Character: Exotic, neo-Baroque fixture on West London dining and drinking circuit.

Funky Features: Inventive design with ornate bar and detailing.

Location and History

Located in residential Notting Hill and set in an attractive lane full of specialist shops and bars, Beach Blanket Babylon (BBB) provides an exotic location. The unmistakable signature interior flaunts its eye-catching modern baroque style, combining an ornately decorated bar with a discreet and intimate restaurant for 120 covers. BBB relies both on grand gesture and on detail for its effect.

Interior

Almost everything at BBB seems to have been specially made or specially chosen but despite the range of influences, the place has a distinct and coherent personality. Here light from fireplaces and candelabras glimmers golden on the bar, or eye-catching Trencadi mosaic is set off by sensuous seventeenth century furniture, marble floors and bonsai trees. Tall French windows look onto a small drinks terrace and surrounding local architecture. The attention that has been paid to tiled surfaces, gilt edges and elaborate floral displays and to every candle-lit corner of the dining area is matched by the invention and quality of the menu. BBB even boasts its own range (‘La Valliere’) of appropriately lavish-looking vintage costume jewellery which visitors can browse or buy. BBB also has a sense of humour – a close look at the walls in the bar and the lavatories reveals ornately framed aristocratic portraiture some of it cheekily erotic.

Spaces for Hire

You can seat your guests at long tables in these elegant, low-ceilinged barrel-vaulted rooms reserving special guests a place in the pique-assiette mosaic booth near the open kitchen. Here, you can trace a touch of Gothic influence in the wrought ironwork of the windows, while the upper dining gallery, a spectacular circular space has middle eastern overtones with its embroidered cushioned seating, pointed colonnade and intimate atmosphere.

Beach Blanket Babylon cleverly mixes traditional influences and contemporary thinking to create a bar unlike any other in town. It’s ideal location for a unique and group party event, the sort of place where anything might happen, and most things do.