Side by side Rosewood Villa Magna vs The Thief

The case here is the address: deep in Salamanca on the Castellana, footsteps from the best shopping and restaurants in Madrid, and several travellers rank it above the Four Seasons and level with the Mandarin Oriental Ritz on that point alone. Breakfast and the bar back it up: the calamari and fava beans get named specifically, and even guests who left frustrated by other things still bring up the buffet and the Tarde.O crowd.

Set against that: a concierge named Pablo tracked down a lost passport through overnight contacts at El Corte Inglés before a 6am flight, and another stay saw a doctor arranged within the hour for a guest with a respiratory infection. Those moments are real, but so are the ordinary slip-ups: coffee arriving with grounds still in it, one stay losing hot water two nights out of three, pancakes sent back undercooked twice at the same table. Billing is the sharper problem. Several 2026 guests describe incorrect charges that took days of emails and late-night calls to sort out; one froze their card rather than keep arguing. There's no pool, and more than one traveller has described the place as feeling like a restaurant-and-bar collection with rooms attached rather than a full five-star hotel. Service is competent and occasionally warm, but it does what's asked rather than anticipating it, which is a fair gap from what Rosewood delivers at its best addresses.

Book it for the address, the breakfast, and the bar scene, and go in with your eyes open: check the folio daily, and don't expect the room or the spa to be the memory you take home. Travellers wanting a full-service five-star with a pool and steadier polish tend to land at the Four Seasons down the road, but nobody's saying it has this address.

The Thief sits on its own spit of land in Tjuvholmen, and what you're paying for first is that setting: floor-to-ceiling windows, mirrors angled to pull in the fjord, art on every wall that more than one guest has compared to a small gallery. The breakfast is the other reason to book – several people who've stayed all over Oslo call it the best in the city, and the rooftop kitchen's Camembert starter and peach-and-chocolate dessert get named by guests who never even booked a room. Front-desk staff who go out of their way show up often enough to matter: one guest got upgraded to a higher floor after a rough travel day, another had the same breakfast table held for her all week by a waiter named Sylvester.

The rooms don't all deliver the marketing shot. Ask for a higher floor and you might still land facing the alley behind the museum, where garbage trucks and late-night chatter run past the window several times a night, and one guest counted being woken six to eight times over two stays. Base rooms run small, the gym is showing its age, and the spa – lovely as it is – won't blow away anyone who's been to a proper wellness hotel. A few stays have gone properly wrong too: a broken door lock patched with duct tape, a turndown team that walked in on a Do Not Disturb sign, a kitchen a guest watched cooking without gloves. None of it is the norm, but it happens often enough that you shouldn't assume five-star polish at every turn.

Book it if what you want is the location, the breakfast, and a design hotel with real character rather than a chain gloss – ask for a room away from the alley side and you'll dodge the worst of it. Skip it if you need flawless, hands-on service every time; that's inconsistent here. For the setting and the food alone, it's worth the rate.