Hotels – boutique, budget or both? – All round creative junkie

Luxury and small budgets don’t always go hand in hand, you usually have to sacrifice one of them to get the other. Both in our homes and leisure time we all yearn for a little bit of luxury, but our hard earned cash usually goes on essentials first with life’s little luxuries at the bottom of the money planner.

Personally I’d love to own a Tom Dixon light or an Arne Jacobsen Egg chair, but while my budget mostly covers food and heat at the moment I’ll have to settle for my ancient, but trusty, tetrad sofa and second hand revamps. Holidays are the same, I’d love recreate my honeymoon in Thailand to the Shangri-La in Bangkok and the Santiburi-Dusit in Koh Samui. Or return to Florence to, quite honestly, any hotel at all as I love this city so much! However now we have a young family, run two businesses and work for ourselves the chances of these happening anytime soon are very slim.

So in my attempt to find a little bit of luxury in our family holidays I might have just stumbled across this little gem of a hotel chain. The German chain Motel One recently opened a budget design hotel in Newcastle and when invited to the opening I wanted to see if they could really put budget and design together.

On High Bridge Street, one of the quirkiest streets in the centre of Newcastle, the hotel has used the existing building for the old part of the hotel and created a new building behind the street. The entrance is stunning using the existing building archway with what look like the original tiles. They use the new and old to their advantage and have two room styles to suit both buildings. Motel One use the local area and backgrounds in each of their hotels, this one includes the black and white stripes of Newcastle United FC, the rail heritage of Robert Stephenson and a bridges theme to represent the seven bridges across the Tyne with bespoke wallpaper showing the bridges with a vintage twist.

The public areas in the hotel were a big surprise, for a hotel that starts at just £49 per room, you don’t expect egg chairs, arc lamps, leather chairs, lovely velvets and fake fur stools, plus quirky breakfast areas – I do love a good chalkboard wall!

The interior designer herself showed me around the rooms, have to say I was genuinely surprised at how lovely they were. German designed so everything was perfectly ordered and although quite small rooms, everything you need from a city hotel was there including a view of the Tyne bridge. It really did feel like a boutique hotel with velvet curtains, Egyptian cotton bed linen and a monsoon rain shower, but for £49 per room including wifi – you don’t get that from the big boys – I’m definitely considering it for my next city break. I believe they do have some family rooms in their hotels although I didn’t get chance to see them this time.