Stay: Wren Hotel, Dublin 2

I slept in a night club. AMA.

Wren Urban Nest
Andrew’s Lane, Dublin 2
wrenhotel.ie

I committed a cardinal sin the other week. I stayed in a hotel that used to be a night club. Please forgive me. What used to be Andrew’s Lane Theatre and home to WAR, ALT, Hangar and many more club nights that shaped many of the people my age, is now a bougie and environmentally-focused hotel in the centre of town.

Staying in a hotel in Dublin isn’t something I’d usually do, but as I am decamped to Wicklow, I had a rush of work in Dublin that saw me working late nights and early mornings in town, so decided to save some Zs while losing €s. It had to be done.

Whenever I’ve looked into staying in a hotel when I’m DJing late nights at the weekend, the rates are more than I would earn, making it a pointless venture. Booking myself in on a Tuesday night, a Tuesday night that was the day after a bank holiday, I was lucky to find a room in Wren for €95, but it was double that for the Saturday of the same week.

Borrowing from the neat and precise Scandinavian style book, Wren is full of soft furnishing by Mourne Textiles and muted natural colours. However, I was taken slightly aback at breakfast in the basement ALT restaurant, a name that hurts younger me, when I had flashbacks to descending those very stairs 15 or so years ago to the soundtrack of Bloc Party and MSTRKRFT, drunk on alcopops and rocking a wonky home-cut fringe. We can outrun our past, but we can’t outrun the ghosts, wha?