Four Seasons Madrid

I arrived in the rain, in the back of a car, and saw the hotel before I saw anything else in the city. The building takes a corner and comes to a point, and from the windscreen it reads as a prow, the Madrid answer to the Flatiron. It is the kind of exterior that makes you want the inside to be good, which is a dangerous position for a hotel to put itself in.

The inside is new and the shell is old, and the join is where I do my looking. A hotel built into historic buildings almost always gives itself away somewhere: a corridor that runs the wrong way, a service door in the wrong place, and above all the smell of cooking drifting out of the kitchens and up the lift shafts into the bedroom floors. I have an obsession about this and I am not apologising for it. Several good hotels in old buildings, with more than one restaurant to feed, fail it. In four floors of walking around here I never caught it once, which means someone solved a dull and expensive problem properly before any of the decorating began.

The room

I was in an Executive Suite, which runs from around sixty square metres upwards. The number matters less than the plan: the living end and the sleeping end are properly divided, by joinery that reaches the ceiling, so you can work all morning in one half while the other half stays a bedroom. For two people on holiday it is more space than anyone strictly needs. For anyone travelling with work attached it is the reason to book this category and stop reading the others.

The bathroom is enormous and does not waste it: a long vanity, a tub standing free on dark stone, and enough room to leave two people's belongings out without either of them minding. The cabinetry throughout is walnut laid in chevrons, which could easily have read as a showroom and instead reads as a ship. Nothing I would change.

Eating

The roof holds Dani García's brasserie, and it is the part of the hotel the city knows about. I ate there at midday and again in the evening, and midday is the better meal. The light does more, the room is calmer, and in decent weather the tables move outside onto the terrace, where you sit level with an ornate domed tower across the street and look down the length of the Gran Vía. The thing to order is the club sandwich with salmon and caviar. It sounds like a joke about hotel food and it is not.

Breakfast is busy and stays busy, which is what a hotel of this size does in a city that eats late and talks through it. The service runs generously long, so the answer is to come down late. I had my best mornings there at an hour most hotels would have stopped serving.

The spa

This is the part of the hotel I would send people to and the part they skip. Business travellers run out of time, and the result is that the quietest room in a very busy hotel sits half empty on a weekday afternoon. I went down twice and both times it was silent. The pool is long enough to swim properly in, which is rarer than it sounds, the light comes down through the glass roof, and the attendants bring water and herbal tea to everyone who arrives without being asked for it. If your stay is short, take two hours out of it for this.

Isa, and the bar beside it

Isa is the Asian room, and it earns its place on the night you have had enough of Spanish cooking, which in Madrid arrives sooner than you expect. The cooking is bolder than the room lets on, and the room is very well judged: floral chairs, dark marble, low light. The bar next to it was the surprise of the stay. A live DJ, the music chosen properly and mixed at a volume that leaves conversation alone, and an atmosphere that takes you somewhere other than Spain for a couple of hours. I liked it more than I expected to.

Advisor's perspective

This is the Madrid hotel I would put a first-time visitor in, and the one I would put a returning visitor in when the trip has work inside it. The position is as central as the city offers and you walk everywhere from the door, which is most of the argument. The building gives you something to look at before you have left the lobby. The spa gives you a reason to come back upstairs in the middle of the day, and almost nobody uses it.

What it is not is a quiet hideaway. The ground floor is a public room for a good part of the day, the restaurants belong to the city as much as to the guests, and if you want a hotel that feels like a private house you should tell me and I will send you somewhere else. Taken for what it is, a grand hotel in the middle of a capital that knows exactly how grand it is, it does the job with very little to complain about.