The Hotel Palacio O’Farrill is a terrifically grand neoclassical mansion standing on the corner of Cuba & Chacon Streets near the port of Havana. Its owner, Don Ricardo O’Farrill y O’Daly, made his fortune in the slave trade, & owned several large sugar mills. The entrance hall of his house is almost ludicrously impressive, with a toweringly high ceiling, & vast iron-studded polished mahogany doors. Also not to be missed, are two small but elegant black marble seats in the hallway or the idiosyncratically double-scrolled archway leading into the courtyard.

The general aesthetic of the O’Farrill is Cuban colonial; Hibernian it is not, but as if to rectify the situation the colour green has been applied with a liberal hand throughout the establishment. On occasion enthusiasm for the Emerald Isle seems to run amuck, such as in the stinging viridian in the stained glass fanlights & the startling lime-green walls of the sitting rooms in the suites.

The faces of visitors drinking pre-lunch cocktails in the courtyard also acquire an interesting hue from the greenish tinge of the canopy which shades them from the sun. However the restaurant and snack bar break with the chromatic norm, & the latter, decorated in mahogany with terracotta furnishings, proves welcomingly cool relief after a morning of sightseeing in what can sometimes feel like the blast furnace, albeit the very picturesque one, of Old Havana.

A particularly attractive feature of the Palacio O'Farrill building is the way in which the mahogany detailing has been left unpainted, being simply varnished to show the beauty of the wood. Throughout the building there are pieces of good old Cuban furniture as well as numerous reproductions, but the latter are so well made in exact imitation of traditional pieces that the overall impression is one of pleasing visual harmony.

The 35 standard rooms at the Palacio O’Farrill have peach walls and green-stained modern furniture. They’re comfortable, clean and bright but not grand. Windows tend to be small but still provide lots of light. They have particularly attractive tiled floors, squishy sofas and chairs with green (naturally) upholstery and the bathrooms, although small, are shinily clean and functional. There are only 2 standard rooms with matrimonial beds. The other 33 are twin bedded.

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The 3 suites at the Palacio O’Farrill are almost unbelievably grand in terms of space – they’re so large and have such exaggeratedly high ceilings that all their furniture looks as if it were dolls’-house sized. The rooms have beautiful inlaid marble floors and are decorated with Cuban antiques; room 201 contains an irresistible piece of nineteenth century mahogany furniture: a baby’s cradle, made up with crisp white linen sheets and a tiny linen-covered pillow. Floor-to-ceiling French doors open onto balconies overlooking the street and the bathrooms are tiled in beautiful deep green and grey Cuban marble. Highly recommended for those wishing to indulge their delusions of late eighteenth century Colonial grandeur.

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