Radisson RED Brussels

If you’re from the UK and want to visit Brussels to pay your last respects to the Union Jack hanging outside the European Parliament buildings there, book yourself into the city’s new Radisson RED Hotel. Not only is it less than a 2-minute walk away, the fun and funky nature of the hotel might help cheer you up afterwards.

When you look at the flags you realise that, for alphabetical reasons, the United Kingdom’s flag is the last one on the right. When the time comes the flagpole can be uprooted without causing any disruption whatsoever to the rest of the row of flags. After seeing that, you might welcome a game of pool or foosball in the hotel lobby.

Pool in the lobby? Yes. The first thing that you see when you enter the hotel is not a bank of check-in desks but a bright red pool table, with a foosball table off to one side. They’re not merely for decoration, either. There’s every chance guests will be using them, turning the usual quiet and anodyne hotel reception area into more of a social gathering place, where people are glad to hang out.

This being Belgium, the land of Tin-Tin, the lobby walls are covered in cartoons, as are many of the other public spaces. If you’re waiting for someone in reception and they’re late, at least you have something to read. Off one side of the lobby is the restaurant, and at the back the word SLEEP in big letters lets you know where the lifts are.

Close by the lifts are the touch-screens that guests use to check themselves in and out – with staff around to help, of course. If you like, you can post a selfie from the lobby onto the large projection screen opposite the check-ins.

The cartoon fun and creative design continues into the bedrooms. Hooks on the wall are in the shape of red mooses’ heads, while the coathangers in the wardrobe are also a funky shape and have BORROWED FROM RED written on them.

The wardrobe itself is covered in bold black-and-white pop art designs, although the in-your-face cartoon style doesn’t cover every space, thankfully. Some of the walls are a more restful plain grey, offset by some dashes of retro-style colours, like lime-green. The RED, though, is not a hotel for anyone who prefers their room to be bland.

The hotel also has a fitness room and a sauna, which we never found time to try, but the KTCHN restaurant breakfast provided a great start to each day. The breakfast choices – or Morning Fuel in RED-speak – were simple but tasty and inexpensive. Nine euros got you scrambled eggs with bacon or smoked salmon, while eggs hollandaise were €6.5. Everything came with toast and as much coffee as you could drink. The sign next to the coffee machine made us smile: Depresso: The feeling you get when you’ve run out of coffee. Or, indeed, when you’ve run out of Europe.