Glassford Street in Glasgow’s Merchant City is a workaday kind of place. Cars whizz past on their way to park at the NCP. A giant Nisbets sells catering equipment on the corner. There are a couple of bars that have seen better days. There’s no sign of anything unusual or extraordinary: until you spot the monkeys.

Two gold macaques, tails aloft, perch like footmen either side of a dark, glowing doorway in an Edwardian building. This is the entrance to House Of Gods, Glasgow’s brand-new rock’n’roll boutique hotel, and stepping across the threshold gives you a tiny taste of how Alice must have felt tripping into that rabbit hole. 

The Glassford Street venue is the second under the brand from renegade Scottish hoteliers Mike and Ross Baxter. Their first venture opened in Edinburgh’s Cowgate in 2019, six months before covid all but shut down the hospitality trade. Yet despite this, the hotel went on to win Sunday Times Hotel Of The Year in 2020 and has been at almost 100% occupancy ever since. Inside, the Glasgow branch is glitzy, ritzy and just the right side of bizarre. At the reception desk, I loiter next to a life-sized gorilla, while a friendly receptionist fetches me a welcome watermelon tonic. She then leads me through a dark maze of velvet-cushioned doors to my room. 

The suite I’m staying in is wood-panelled, bronze-glowing. It has a cocooning feel, which Mike Baxter, who designs the interiors himself, later explains is based partly on the old Orient Express train carriages. The lighting is so subtle and integrated it seems to emanate from the room itself, a bit like that briefcase in Pulp Fiction when it’s opened. Mirror tiles shimmer underneath the cornicing. 1920s-style shutters on the windows throw slices of film noir shadows across the four-poster bed. There’s a tiger-print sofa, a copper bathtub, more monkeys. 

Further investigation reveals I have a butler button, enabling me to press for ‘Prosecco’, ‘Milk And Cookies’, or just general butlery, any time until 1am. ‘We wanted to create something that was super experiential,’ says Mike Baxter, as we chat in the bar downstairs, on velvet sofas printed with Tibetan tiger motifs. ‘Opulent, luxurious and decadent, a wee bit rock’n’roll and a wee bit wild. There are properties like that already, but they tend to be heritage hotels that cost all the money in the world.’

Budget travel has, Baxter believes, killed off the romance of the travel of yesteryear; though, as he points out, that was only ever ‘reserved for the rich and worshipped’. His aim was to create an environment that conjured up the essence of old-world travel, but without the price tag. Staying at House Of Gods is by no means cheap, he admits, but his plan was always for it to be accessible for special occasions and splurges.

‘I like the idea that anyone can come here, you can step into what is arguably quite a ridiculous sort of aesthetic and surrounding, and it’s immersive.’ What is pleasing about chatting to Baxter, aside from his refreshing enthusiasm for accessibility in an industry famed for its snootiness, is his wry awareness of the absurdity of his maximalist tastes. There are monkeys everywhere; perching on the bedside shelf, skulking in corners. The glass Sacred Garden rooftop bar boasts a whopping 3000 artificial flowers; meanwhile, behind us in the bar stands an Italian marble fountain, converted into a fireplace. How does Baxter carefully curate all these extravagant quirky touches and unusual objets d’art? Turns out he buys them while tipsy. 

‘I bought that fountain in an auction outside of Rome,’ he points out. ‘I was drunk, and when I got it here I was like “what the hell do I need a fountain for? I haven’t got a garden.’” The same thing happened with the 900kg marble bathtub he just had to have. Originally destined for the presidential suite, the removers couldn’t get it up the stairs, so they had to leave it in the lobby, with Baxter telling his investors ‘I bought this incredible champagne bucket . . . ’

Baxter certainly understands the value of a story in building a hotel’s personality. There is a mystique about hotels, individualistic yet by their nature anonymous. Hotels have been used to intoxicating effect in film, from the baroque bustle of the Grand Budapest Hotel to David Lynch’s unsettling Lost Highway Hotel. It was a hotel that Agatha Christie disappeared to during the breakdown of her marriage in 1926 (The Old Swan in Harrogate) and a hotel in which Oscar Wilde lived out his final days (L’Hotel, Paris). 

During the pandemic, when hospitality businesses were floundering, the newly opened House Of Gods in Edinburgh knew it had to do something to stay afloat. Unable to open the bar, the team came up with the idea of serving cocktails in the rooms with a theatrical twist. ‘We thought, let’s make it fun,’ Baxter recalls. ‘Rather than saying “I will deliver cocktails to your room”, we’ll take you on a journey.’ Covid guidelines were to leave drinks outside the rooms, so they decided to fill the corridors with smoke, place the drinks in skulls garlanded with flowers and blast rock music through the sound system. Now that tale is built into the hotel’s lore through the legacy of their in-room cocktail service, where a waiter shakes your drinks while spinning you a yarn about the cocktail’s origins. 

Stories feel as important to the House Of Gods ethos as its opulence. Yes, it’s beautiful and sensual, full of expensive things. But it’s also full of anecdotes and playfulness. The giant gorilla lounging in the lobby, I am told by Emma on reception, is called Joffrey, uses ‘she’ pronouns and may at some point have her own Instagram. Later, in bed, I flick what I think is the bedside light switch only for a red neon rim to light up the inside of the four-poster canopy. ‘Ah, you found the naughty switch,’ Baxter grins, when I mention it to him at breakfast.

Back in the suite, in the interests of lifestyle journalism, I feel duty-bound to try out that butler button. I feel extremely awkward summoning a butler. What does one do after pressing the button? Wait by the door? Sprawl across the four-poster bed? Will he knock? 

He knocks. He is friendly, polo-shirted. Pleasingly unbutlery. 

I ask for a cup of tea (The List is rock’n’roll, you know) which he brings me. And now I have tea and a four-poster bed with a neon-rimmed canopy, and for a brief few moments, the world is fabulous.

House Of Gods, 61 Glassford Street, Glasgow; 233 Cowgate, Edinburgh, visit the House Of Gods website.