The hotel is located in a Dongcheng hutong area north-east of the Forbidden City. The location is great. The building is a typical grey-brick Beijing courtyard hotel, with beautiful decoration and a nice courtyard where you can have breakfast (like in most Chinese places nothing for I-need-an-excellent-coffee-in-the-morning-freaks), drinks and wifi. Just a few steps down the street is the restaurant Source which I highly recommend. Great food, also a wonderful courtyard. Separées are available for bigger parties. A few more steps down is a lively bar, frequented by an interesting mix of expats and their Chinese friends. Younger people in their 20s/30s mostly. Exciting drinks with home-made essences which are mixed with vodka, gin, etc. We enjoyed it, although quite a bit past that age. It's a short walk to the Luogu Alley with all its bars, cafés and restaurants.
Our room was small. Not very much space left to move. The bathroom was also small but ok. For delicate people it could have been cleaner. Which is also true of the carpet.
The staff speaks English, is nice and helpful. They organised a friendly driver with a comfortable car which took us to the Huang Hua part of the wall (lake wall - a wilder, unrestored part of the wall, quiet, untouristy but you have to climb a ladder to get onto it).
It is important that you ask the hotel staff to write down for you not only the address of the hotel to show it to taxi drivers but also the name of the adjacent bigger street. Many taxi drivers simply refuse to drive into the hutong area and won't take you anywhere if you can't tell them at which corner of a bigger street you want to be dropped of.
All in all, a very good place to stay if you're able of overlooking a few flaws in the cleanliness of bath and carpet - which I easily can at this price level.
And yes: the mattresses are hard. Some love it, others don't.
- Lusongyuan Hotel Beijing
