The Savoy’s Around the World festive scheme, illustrated by Dinara Akhmedzhanova

The Savoy’s Christmas unfolds not as tinsel and convention but as a visual expedition through Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days, drawn from an actual postcard discovered in the hotel’s archives and brought to life by London illustrator Dinara Akhmedzhanova across its public spaces and suites from tomorrow evening.

What distinguishes this festive narrative is its refusal of predictability. Rather than apply a generic seasonal template, The Savoy has chosen a single organizing principle: the mythology of journey itself. That historical postcard becomes an anchor point, a genuine thread connecting today’s guests to the adventurers who once walked these same corridors. The hotel’s century and a half of receiving the world’s most travelled clientele becomes inseparable from the story it now tells.

What distinguishes this festive scheme is its refusal of generic seasonal decoration. Rather than apply a template, The Savoy has anchored the season to an actual postcard discovered in its archives, one that connects today’s guests to the adventurers who once stayed here. Illustrator Dinara Akhmedzhanova, working from that historical document, has created a visual language across the hotel’s public spaces and suites: hot air balloons in red, yellow and green hang on a Christmas tree beneath the hotel’s iconic neon sign, ornaments shaped to suggest the precise moment before departure.

Akhmedzhanova’s work gives the season an authorial voice: the hand of a specific artist making creative choices about colour, line and composition rather than generic decoration applied across properties. Her palette of ochres, deep greens, burgundies and gold leaf echoes nineteenth-century travel maps, yet her line work carries a clarity that feels immediate rather than nostalgic. The illustrations function as a sustained narrative across the hotel’s suites and public spaces, each one distinct, each one suggesting a moment in the journey itself.

The Savoy’s position in London’s theatrical heart gives this iteration cultural weight beyond ornament. For more than a century, the hotel has been where travellers arrived and departed, where stories were exchanged, where the world’s routes converged. To frame Christmas through commissioned illustrations rather than off-the-shelf decoration feels like a natural expression of what the hotel fundamentally is: a pause point in journeys much larger than a single stay.

The transformation shapes itself across the public spaces where guests arrive and gather: the lobby, the corridors, the dining spaces. Each becomes a staging point in the narrative of voyage and arrival. The hotel’s own architecture, already carrying the weight of departure, becomes the canvas for illustrations about departure itself. The visual coherence comes not from applied ornament but from a single creative vision sustained across time and space.

The festive scheme runs through the Christmas period at The Savoy, Strand, London WC2R 0EU. Guests may reserve rooms and dining experiences through thesavoy.com or by contacting the reservations team directly. The public spaces, including the lobby and corridors, display the full sequence of Akhmedzhanova’s illustrations, while selected suites feature bespoke artwork. The exhibition remains on view throughout the festive season.

The festive season runs through the Christmas period at The Savoy, Strand, London. Reservations and further details are available through the hotel’s official channels.

The Savoy opened in 1889 on the Strand, designed by architect Richard D’Oyly Carte as a palace of modernity and arrival. Its Thames-facing position made it the natural terminus for travellers completing their journeys across Europe and beyond, a role it maintained through the golden age of global exploration that Verne himself chronicled. The hotel’s archive, now spanning more than a century of guest records and ephemera, contains layers of these stories: the postcards guests sent home, the luggage tags, the boarding passes tucked into desk drawers. That single postcard discovered within those records becomes more than decoration; it is evidence of the hotel’s own role in the culture of adventure.

Dinara Akhmedzhanova, a London-based illustrator whose work has appeared in publications and campaigns requiring both historical accuracy and contemporary visual language, approached the commission by studying not only Verne’s text but the visual conventions of nineteenth-century travel literature. Her palette, ochres, deep greens, burgundies and gold leaf, echoes the colour worlds of Victorian exploration maps and vintage travel ephemera, yet her line work carries a clarity that feels immediate and modern. The distinction matters: nostalgia without artifice, historical reference without pastiche. Her illustrations across the hotel’s suites and public spaces function as a sustained narrative thread rather than isolated moments.

The festive programme runs through the Christmas period at The Savoy, Strand, London WC2R 0EU. The hotel’s public spaces, including the lobby and corridors, display the full sequence of Akhmedzhanova’s illustrations, while selected suites feature bespoke artwork. Guests may reserve rooms and dining experiences through the hotel’s website at thesavoy.com or by contacting the reservations team directly. The exhibition remains on view throughout the festive season, with the artwork shifting in appearance as daylight changes and evening arrives.

Imagery courtesy of The Savoy (@thesavoylondon).