The Harbour Hotel, Brighton | Travel

For our wedding anniversary B and I went to Brighton for a few days! Neither of us had ever been to Brighton before and we loved it. We stayed in a place called The Harbour Hotel on the Brighton seafront. Here’s a little review of it, should anyone be reading this with the idea of going to Brighton (hi!), and so we can look at some nice hotel interiors! A nest away from the nest (someone once told me they ‘make a nest’ when they go to a hotel, ie. unpack all their stuff and make it feel like home, and that stayed with me because I found it so cute)!

The Harbour Hotel, Brighton

This hotel is right on the Brighton seafront, in the middle of town. So it couldn’t be better positioned. There was some ugly scaffolding on the front of the building while we were there, so I didn’t bother taking a photo of its exterior, but here’s what the room looked like!

The bed was massive and extremely comfortable. It was also sooooo warm in there, it was heaven! We froze our asses off when we came back home to our house, hahah. The windows, however, weren’t that thick, so we were woken up several times by the sounds of people shouting on the street below, and by the bar/restaurant throwing all their glass bottles into the recycling bin at about 1am. There were complementary earplugs in the bathroom… maybe that’s why they were there!

The bathroom was warm and the shower was hot and powerful, which is all I care about in hotels. You get a dressing gown and slippers for use in the spa, too.

There’s this little ‘lounge area’ before you go into the actual bedroom, which I thought was quite cute! Didn’t touch the sherry or the gin, obvs.

It’s me. Hi.

And the complementary tea & coffee is inside the wardrobe. There’s a Nespresso machine with coffee pods out on the table, but I wasn’t sure if you got charged for using it. So we didn’t touch it, just in case.

Just perving over the design on this tea! How pretty?!?!

NOW GET READY FOR THE BEST SEA VIEW YOU’VE EVER SEEN IN YOUR LIFE!!!!!!

…..

Yeah. A wall. B and I have this running joke that, whenever we go and stay somewhere, our view is always of a wall, because we’ve had so many wall-views in our time. And, true to form, we had a wall view again this time! I actually love seeing walls out of hotel windows now, because it makes me laugh. If I go away by myself and I have a wall view, I take a photo and send it to B and say “Look at my amazing view!”. You’ve got to make the best of things and at the end of the day, I don’t think the view out of a hotel window is anything to get upset about! ❤

Now, when it comes to hotels I’m not too fussed about staying in ‘posh’ places, to be honest. I’m happy enough in a budget hotel as long as the bed is comfy and the shower is hot. But B booked this hotel because it had an ‘underground spa’.

The Spa

This is something we didn’t know, which is worth mentioning: Use of the gym and spa is included when you make your booking directly through the hotel website. But if you book via booking.com or something like that – which we did – you need to pay an extra £10 per person, per day, to use the spa. So we ended up paying an extra £40. I mean, it was worth it, but it’s kind of an annoying rule when you think you’re saving money by using a site like booking.com and in the end, you’re not. But it was a really nice spa and we had our hearts set on it, so of course we went. 🙂

This is how it looks when you walk down the stairs into the spa. There’s a chillout area here, and another one with bigger seating right at the back of the spa. There are magazines and stuff to read.

There’s a pool and a hydrotherapy pool (a big jacuzzi, basically), and then an area where the hot tubs, sauna & steam room are. This bit looks like an underground cave. I loved the exposed brickwork and low lighting!!

Can someone install this in my home, please?

We loved it down here! It was so relaxing. If we were to go to Brighton and to this hotel again I think we’d stay for longer than 2 days so that we had more time to really relax and enjoy the spa for longer. Because of the chillout area you could basically take a book down there and read all day, if you wanted to!

There is a little gym upstairs as well which we used, but I forgot my phone so there aren’t any photos of that. It had a decent amount of equipment for us to be able to do a leg workout which killed us, so I’d say it was a good gym.

Breakfast

Totally forgot about breakfast! You get a continental buffet and can order English breakfast or avocado on toast (etc.) from the menu, but if you’ve paid for breakfast then it’s all included and you can have as much as you want. I’m vegan and I usually look at what breakfast options hotels have before I book, but because B booked it all and kept it a secret, I couldn’t check this time. So it was actually quite a good experience to go with the flow and see what I could do with what I had. In the end I had a veggie breakfast but asked for them to leave the eggs & halloumi cheese out of it (which they happily did). I also asked for soya milk (they also had almond) & made my own cereal with muesli, dried fruit, chia seeds & pumpkin seeds. And obviously, I had black coffee & grapefruit juice. So it was fine! Judging by what I had, and how the rest of the buffet looked, the food at this hotel was of very good quality. 🙂

I didn’t take any photos of breakfast, so please enjoy this stock image of a pancake stack that I now desperately want to eat:

A very good experience at The Harbour Hotel, all in all!

Bis bald (seeya soon!),
Constanze x