Vitae Lifestyle
Edit No.21 — The Village in the Middle of London
Lita, The BoTree, Rebase, BXR, and The Wallace Collection.
Marylebone has always behaved like a village stitched into the middle of London — quieter streets, independent shops, restaurants and hotels that people return to rather than tick off. Edit No.21 is a portrait of that village as it looks now, told through the openings that most clearly express it.
It begins with Lita, the Mediterranean sharing-plate restaurant on Paddington Street that opened in spring 2024 and won a Michelin star within a year. Named for "abuelita" — the Spanish diminutive for grandmother — Lita set out to be a neighbourhood bistro that happens to operate at the highest level, and the speed with which it was recognised suggests it arrived already knowing itself.
It continues with The BoTree, the design-led "conscious luxury" hotel on Marylebone Lane, built on the site of the cult Welbeck Street car park and named for the tree the Buddha sat beneath — a warm, residential, unmistakably Marylebone rebuttal to the brutalist structure it replaced.
It turns underground with Rebase, the subterranean recovery studio on St Vincent Street where cave-like design meets contrast therapy, cryotherapy, and hyperbaric oxygen — an operation born from its founder's rebuilding of his own health, and one of the clearest expressions yet of Marylebone's quiet, considered register.
A few doors down from Lita, on the same short stretch of Paddington Street, sits BXR — the Anthony Joshua-backed gym that opened in 2017 as the world's first luxury boxing club, and made a genuine new category out of an idea that ought to have been a contradiction.
And, as the contemplative counterweight to all of it, The Wallace Collection — a world-class art collection housed in a Manchester Square townhouse, free to enter and forbidden from ever lending a single object, hiding in plain sight five minutes from Oxford Street. More openings from the same square mile will follow in this edit.
In this edit
LIVING — The BoTree
The BoTree — Where the Car Park Stood
A design-led 'conscious luxury' hotel on Marylebone Lane, built on the site of the cult Welbeck Street car park and named for the tree the Buddha sat beneath. Warm, residential, and unmistakably of its neighbourhood.
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EXPERIENCE — The Wallace Collection
The Wallace Collection — The Museum Hiding in Plain Sight
A world-class art collection in a Marylebone townhouse — Hals's Laughing Cavalier, Fragonard's Swing, one of the great armouries — free to enter, and never allowed to lend a single object.
Read →Each article in this edit is experienced first-hand and written independently. All Vitae Lifestyle articles are archived under Lifestyle and can be read out of sequence.
Questions about this edit
What is covered in Edit No.21?
Edit No.21 — The Village in the Middle of London — is a portrait of Marylebone told through five openings that most clearly express its village-in-the-city character: Lita, the Mediterranean sharing-plate restaurant on Paddington Street that won a Michelin star within a year of opening; The BoTree, the design-led 'conscious luxury' hotel on Marylebone Lane, built on the site of the cult Welbeck Street car park; Rebase, the subterranean recovery studio on St Vincent Street pairing ancient practice with cryotherapy and hyperbaric oxygen; BXR, the Anthony Joshua-backed gym that opened in 2017 as the world's first luxury boxing club; and The Wallace Collection, the free national museum at Hertford House on Manchester Square.
Why call Marylebone a village?
Marylebone sits in central London but keeps the rhythm and scale of a neighbourhood: independent shops, quieter side streets like Paddington Street and Marylebone Lane, and restaurants, hotels and studios people return to rather than tick off. The pieces in this edit — a bistro named for the Spanish diminutive of grandmother, a hotel named for the tree the Buddha sat beneath, a recovery studio built into a basement, a boxing gym a few doors from a Michelin room, and a townhouse museum on a garden square — are all precise expressions of that character.
Where is The BoTree, and what stood on the site before?
The BoTree sits on Marylebone Lane, on the site of the former Welbeck Street car park — the cult Brutalist structure by Michael Blampied demolished in 2019. Named for the tree beneath which the Buddha is said to have gained enlightenment, it opened in 2022 as a 199-room design-led 'conscious luxury' hotel that reads as a warm, residential, unmistakably Marylebone rebuttal to the building it replaced.
What is Rebase Recovery?
Rebase is a wellness and recovery studio on St Vincent Street in Marylebone, opened in May 2024. Built into a largely subterranean, cave-like space designed by Atelier Wren, it combines traditional practices — Finnish and infrared saunas, ice baths, breathwork, yoga — with modern recovery technology including cryotherapy at -110°C, a four-person hyperbaric oxygen chamber, vitamin infusions, and sports massage, all bookable from a single £65 drop-in.
What makes BXR different from an ordinary boxing gym?
BXR opened on Paddington Street in January 2017 as the world's first luxury boxing gym, backed by heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua and a high-profile founding committee. The 1,115-square-metre space by Bergman Interiors renders the raw materials of a traditional boxing gym — concrete, mirror, leather — in luxury finishes, around a full-size ring, an on-site sports-medicine clinic, and the BXR Lab recovery area. Sweat by BXR is the pay-to-train class programme for non-members.
Is the Wallace Collection really free, and why can't it lend works?
Yes — entry to the permanent collection is free, open daily 10am to 5pm at Hertford House on Manchester Square. When Lady Wallace bequeathed the collection to the nation in 1897, she did so on the condition that no object should ever leave it, even on temporary loan. That stipulation is the key to the place: every piece — from Hals's Laughing Cavalier to one of the great armouries in the world — can only ever be seen here.