Fellows House is part of the Curio Collection, the brand-within-a-brand from Hilton, effectively a collection of hotels that are independent, but not really. Remember when Tesco launched its own in-store café, Harris + Hoole, which was basically Costa in artisan drag? Imagine the marketing deliberation: “Ampersand or plus sign?” No one was fooled by the fiction that a couple of Hackney hipsters may have opened a café next to the Krispy Kreme donuts at a supermarket check-out. Caffé Nero bought the remnants, closed outlets, and rebranded the remaining baristas as “hooligans”. Edgy or what? 

Fellows House is more successful, with elegant design touches. When the lift doors open, floor numbers are indicated by a numeral hand-painted across the pages of an open book, and the hotel’s artwork has been curated (a rare appropriate use of the word!) to channel Cambridge luminaries of the past, including Alan Turing, Charles Darwin and Siegfried Sassoon.
For all the detail and polish, there is still an inescapable whiff of corporate spritz. The LED screens outside the building, in the hallway and both outside and inside the lifts, are naff. Fellows House is more about function than quirk. The place is largely an aparthotel, with kitchenettes in each of the stark but chic studios and suites, and a decent-sized pool and gym on site. Rooms have giant TV screens, and mercifully simple Bluetooth streaming. A minus: the pointless, ugly stickers with QR codes on bedside mirrors to tell you “your room has been cleaned and disinfected for your comfort”.