Boutique and Luxury Hotels London

Samuel Johnson said it in 1777 and the line has held: when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life. The city he meant was a quarter of the size of the current one and twenty per cent of the architectural complexity, but the principle survives. London is the pile-up of centuries — Roman wall fragments behind the Tower, medieval lanes off Cheapside, the Wren churches of the City, Georgian Mayfair, Regency Belgravia, Victorian Kensington, the post-war concrete of the South Bank, the glass towers of the City and Canary Wharf — and the trick of the city is that all of these layers operate simultaneously across a forty-mile radius without resolving into a single character.

For a long stay, the central neighbourhoods divide into recognised editorial zones, each with its own architectural language and its own pace. Our London collection sits across five of them.

Mayfair is the West End at its most quietly expensive — Georgian townhouses in plane-tree squares, the auction houses on Bond Street, Berkeley Square Gardens, the embassies and the gentlemen's clubs along Piccadilly. Flemings Mayfair is thirteen interconnected Georgian townhouses dating from 1734, privately owned since 1851 — the kind of London hotel where the building itself is the inheritance. Ormer Mayfair, the property's restaurant, holds a Michelin star under chef Sofian Msetfi. The Athenaeum, on Piccadilly directly opposite Green Park, is the property best known for the eight-storey living wall on its facade — three hundred and twenty-nine square metres of vertical garden carrying two hundred and sixty plant species. The wall changes seasonally, and the rooms behind it look directly across Green Park to Buckingham Palace.

Belgravia, immediately south, is the cream-stuccoed counterpart — built in the 1820s by Thomas Cubitt as the most ambitious residential development in London's history, the white terraces around Belgrave Square and Eaton Square still occupied by embassies and the kind of London families who have been there since the original leases. The Goring sits on the corner of Beeston Place a short walk from Buckingham Palace — family-owned since 1910, the only hotel in the world to hold a Royal Warrant, and the property the Middleton family chose for the wedding morning before Catherine Middleton walked across to the Abbey. The Dining Room holds a Michelin star and a Forbes Five-Star rating.

Chelsea has the longest literary inheritance of any London neighbourhood — Carlyle on Cheyne Row, Whistler and Rossetti at Lindsey House, Henry James at Carlyle Mansions, Oscar Wilde on Tite Street until 1895. The King's Road runs the length of the neighbourhood from Sloane Square west to Fulham, the elegant Cadogan Gardens and Cheyne Walk facing the river, and the Saatchi Gallery at the Duke of York's HQ at the eastern end. The Draycott, on Cadogan Gardens, was built in the 1890s as Astor family townhouses and converted into a hotel that retained the original marble fireplaces, antique furniture and the residential character of the street. Guests receive a key to the private garden the hotel sits on.

Knightsbridge is Mayfair's southern cousin — stately, slightly more international, oriented around Harrods and Hyde Park. The Capital sits on Basil Street, fifty metres from Harrods's side entrance — privately owned, Nina Campbell-designed interiors, the first hotel in London purpose-built as a boutique property when it opened in 1971.

Pimlico, on Belgravia's southern edge, is quieter and more residential — Regency garden squares, Pimlico Road's antique shops, the easy walk to Tate Britain on the river. Eccleston Square Hotel sits on the square it takes its name from, with Spanish ownership and an unusual emphasis on technology — Hästens beds, Crestron-controlled rooms, electric blackout windows.

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