Vapoura x The Mandrake: Inside Volume One of After Stories

Vapoura x The Mandrake opens the After Stories series. It is a collaboration between Vapoura Rum, Chapter One, and The Mandrake, one of Fitzrovia's most talked about hotels. Six tracks. Two cocktails. One EP pressed to vinyl. Every element pulled from a different room inside the hotel.

What is After Stories

After Stories is Vapoura's venue collaboration series. Each volume pairs Vapoura with a London venue and asks a simple question. What would this place sound like. Volume One answers that question with The Mandrake.

Inside The Mandrake

The Mandrake sits on Newman Street in Fitzrovia, a short walk from Oxford Circus and Oxford Street. The building was once a RIBA award winning office block. It opened as a hotel in 2017 and has spent every year since refusing to look like anywhere else in London.

Walk in and the courtyard hits first. Jasmine and passion flower hang down from four floors above, wrapping the space in a garden that has no business existing in central London. Waeska, the hotel's bar, sits just off it. A labradorite counter runs the length of the room, and the walls hold a private collection of art and objects that changes often enough to keep regulars guessing.

Up on the first floor terrace, Jurema opens the hotel out to the sky. It runs an outdoor bar alongside YOPO, the hotel's restaurant, serving food shaped by Buenos Aires, Santiago, and Lima. Every room in the building has its own character. No two floors look the same, and that was exactly the brief for this collaboration.

For anyone searching for a Fitzrovia cocktail bar, a boutique hotel near Oxford Circus, or a London venue built around art and sound, The Mandrake is the answer. It's also now home to Vapoura's first After Stories vinyl.

The EP

Six tracks, six rooms. Each one built around a different space inside The Mandrake, from the courtyard to the terrace to the rooms upstairs. CARALUS and Daniel Sehnawi produced the record, working from the hotel itself rather than a studio brief on paper.

The EP was pressed to a limited run of vinyl with The Vinyl Factory. Once it's gone, it's gone. 

The Cocktail Menu

Alongside the record, The Mandrake's bar team built a two cocktail menu using Vapoura Chapter One, developed in partnership with bar lead Anas and running for a limited window only. Same source material as the EP. Same six rooms. Different medium.

How to Experience Vapoura x The Mandrake

The vinyl is limited. The cocktail menu is temporary. Head to The Mandrake in Fitzrovia to hear the record and taste the serves while both are still running, or find Vapoura Chapter One to bring a piece of Volume One home.

Vapoura's After Stories series continues through 2026 with new venues, new records, and new reasons to leave the house.

Venue: The Mandrake

Collaborating Producers: CARALUS & Daniel Sehanwi 

Date: 16·06·26