Chiltern Firehouse is a hot hotel and restaurant. Fortunately, not literally.
A source tells us that during Frieze Week in London, a guest at the swanky eatery mistook a video artwork that included images of a flickering fire for the real thing and pulled the alarm.
The work, “Burning Down the House,” is a video by artist Marco Brambilla — who just created the the backdrop to U2’s opening of the Sphere in Las Vegas — and was commissioned by hotel owner Andre Balazs.
The site-specific piece was filmed within the corridors of the Firehouse and hangs in the hotel stairwell. A source describes it as “a large panel of CCTV-type video screens” that “depict smoke, flames, and guests in various stages of undress fleeing from their rooms.”
We hear a late night guest thought it was live footage and pulled the fire alarm located next to the art installation at 2 a.m.
According to the source, the alarm was turned off by the hotel engineers within two minutes and the fire department — or the fire brigade, as its known across the Pond — did not come to the hotel.
While we’re told that “the front desk was flooded with so many calls that not all [of them] could be answered immediately,” we hear that it all was handled so quickly that no guests were evacuated or even left their rooms.
The five-star hotel, located in a former firehouse in the Marylebone neighborhood is a favorite of A-list celebs like Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Moss, Tom Cruise, Cara Delevingne, Jennifer Lawrence, and David Beckham, to name a few.
Frieze contemporary art fair started Wednesday and will run through the weekend.
Brambilla also created the video that plays in the elevator up to the elegant Boom Boom Room in New York City atop Balazs’ Standard Highline hotel.
