Designed in 1865 by architect Horatio Nelson Goulty, it replaced an earlier building called the Norfolk Inn and is one of several large Victorian hotels along the seafront.

Some large-scale residential development took place, but it was only after 1820—when the road running parallel to the beach was widened and straightened to form a seafront promenade called Kings Road—that the area became easily accessible.

[4] An inn and hotel called the Norfolk Arms was built west of Bedford Square in or before 1824—the year it was first listed in the Baxter's Directory of Brighton.

[5] Architecturally, it had Classical overtones: Ionic columns supported a balcony and veranda across a four-storey central bay with three-storey flanking sections.

The Royal Albion and (original) Bedford Hotels of the 1820s were smaller-scale early examples,[8] but only with the development of the passenger lift could they be built on a grand scale.

Architect Horatio Nelson Goulty was commissioned for the job; an important figure in public life in Brighton, he was one of the founders of the Extra Mural Cemetery in 1850[12] and later in the 1860s designed Congregational churches in Newhaven[13] and Hove.

[10] The author of Moorecroft's Guide (1866), a guidebook about the resort, called the rebuilt hotel "more beautiful than any other building in Brighton"[1][10] despite offering mild criticism of the Grand's very similar architecture.

[8] Along with the Grand and the nearby Metropole (1890), it was one of the "great show hotels on the front", at which only wealthy visitors would have stayed; the thousands of working-class holidaymakers would have used the poorer lodging-houses in less favourable locations.

[17] Early in the 1980s, £2 million was spent on refurbishment, including the opening of an indoor swimming pool and the creation of a lake surrounded by additional rooms, both in 1985.

[19] Horatio Nelson Goulty designed the Norfolk Hotel in the French Renaissance Revival style,[8] "perhaps to compete with the Grand"[1] which, although larger, is similar in appearance.

A 19th-century arched gateway survives from this, leading from the hotel into Norfolk Buildings (a short street); it has a black-painted horse's head on the keystone and the inscription rebuilt a.d.