'Where is Idris Elba?' That’s what my sister and I wrote on our toilet wall at boutique bolthole Brody House in Budapest. With pens in the toilet and a lot of wall graffiti, it felt wrong not to leave a memento of our stay alongside the swear words and – for some unknown reason – Alan Shearer scrawled at least ten times.
The toilets might not seem the best place to start, but they reveal a lot about Brody House's aesthetic. The building the hotel is housed in dates back to 1896 and has bags of charm. Each of its 11 rooms are decorated individually – we stayed in the bullet room on our first night (bathtub in the entrance, 'rough luxe' walls and graffiti-ed toilet cubicle); then the Yusuke studio on our second (terrifying zig zag wooden stairs after a couple of Aperol spritzes, decoupaged walls and not-so-pretty melted plastic bottle coat and towel hooks).
Much of the furniture in the communal areas – where guests are encouraged to hang out, admire local art and help themselves to the honesty bar – is upcycled. An old cable binder becomes a giant table and old sleighs, sewing machine and cookers have also been transformed.
This place is the kind of hotel you want to lounge about in all day – it’s almost tempting to ditch Budapest's famous thermal baths, grand buildings and the Danube river. We help ourselves to fresh lemon and honey tea in between sightseeing and mix our own g&ts to drink in the ivy-clad courtyard before hitting Budapest’s famous ruin bars.
And finally to Idris. On meeting actor Warren Brown (DS Justin Ripley in Luther, or Andy from Hollyoaks) at the Szechenyi Baths, he tells us he is in Budapest for four months to film the American version of the British TV smash. It turns out Brown was filming a new top secret show called Camp X – if he’d told us this at the time he’d have saved us the bother of a) checking Elba’s twitter account to check his Budapest whereabouts (which revealed he was actually DJing in Ibiza) and b) writing ‘where is Idris Elba?’ on our toilet wall. Still, I'm tempted to revisit Brody House and see what other guests write back…
