When Londoners book a hotel in the city, we want to stay somewhere that feels like the pied a terre we would have if we were rich. This is the opposite of what non-Londoners look for in a hotel in the capital — they want to feel like they’re on holiday. We want to feel like we belong.
To me, this explains the appeal of Home House: a member’s club and hotel frequented by Londoners, former Londoners and wannabe Londoners (all of which I have been and have now wound up in Soho).
Home House (the hint is in the name) looks like a house. Its entrance, on 20 Portman Square (just behind Oxford Street), is a plain black door with a brass knocker. There’s no hotel sign, so you could easily walk right past it.
Inside the only suggestion that the luxuriously appointed but austere entrance hall is a reception at all are the staff milling around in dark blue tailored suits looking receptive.
Home House has never really been a hotel. A member’s club that grants access to non-members staying overnight, it was conceived, in the 18th century, as a pavilion to pleasure. The building was commissioned by Elizabeth, Countess of Home, a twice widowed sugar-plantation heiress in her 60s who wanted to build a Neo-Classical party-pad where she could entertain guests. She commissioned celebrated architect, Robert Adam to do the job — it remains his finest surviving London townhouse.
Countess Home’s presence is still felt. The club feels like your eccentric well-travelled millionaire aunt’s home. Lavish but never fussy, despite the effusive chintz. Plush drawing rooms overspill with crystal chandeliers and sumptuous velvet sofas clashing gloriously with modern art packed walls.
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The 23 sumptuous, individually-designed bedrooms feature shimmering gold ceilings, antique oak French beds, Art Deco mirrored bathrooms and hand-painted silk Chinoiserie wallpapered walls. While the centrepiece of the building is Adam’s breathtaking imperial staircase that rises heavenly upwards to a glass dome ceiling looking to the sky.
Of course, like any eccentric aunt’s home, dogs are allowed. So, I took my chocolate labrador, Bear, along.
Bear and I were shown to the sumptuous suite Duke of Atholl’s suite on the Third Floor — it has the layout of a one-bedroom flat and is decorated in a soft-masculine palette of swirling patterns in rich browns and deep greens lit by marble fireplaces, mirrored surfaces and gilt frames.
It has all the elegance of the dream flat I’d have in London if I could afford it. With a bedroom, dimly lit by brass lamps, and decorated with a rich red velvet bed and a gold armoire, for Bear to admire his reflection in like an 18th century prince.
The most showing-off is reserved for the bathroom with its walnut-coloured marble bath originally made in the late 19th century for His Highness Say Aji Rao III, Maharaja Gaekwad of Baroda. Best of all, the vast Georgian windows command a view of central London few can afford.
Bear and I decide to have dinner al-roomo, ordering a room service charcuterie board, which Bear guards with his life. It’s worth it to keep up the fantasy that we live here even if we miss out on the ground floor ‘Eating Room’, decorated with paintings of banquets and the harvest by Zucchi, the husband of artist Angelica Kauffman.
You can sit on the terrace outside and in a private square at the back of the house feasting on Jersey rock oysters and Herwichlamb rump pretending they were prepared by your own chef, in your townhouse. Then after, hit the cocktail bar that serves the best Espresso Martinis in town. For dessert I waft around woozily happy, pretending to be Lady House.
Bedrooms starting from £245 for members and £343 for guests. homehouse.co.uk
