Around the old embassy square: Grosvenor Square's hotels, weighed after dark

Little America, rearranged

For most of the twentieth century Grosvenor Square was the most American address in London. John Adams lived at number 9 as the new republic's first minister to the Court of St James's, Eisenhower kept his headquarters at number 20 in 1942, and from 1960 the entire west side belonged to the United States embassy, a long Saarinen building with a gilded eagle spread across its roof. Londoners called the square Little America, and the security barriers became part of its furniture.

The embassy left for Nine Elms in 2018, and the square has been changing its tenants ever since. The Saarinen building is being remade as The Chancery Rosewood, the most anticipated hotel opening in W1 for years; whether it is receiving guests on your dates is a question for the hotel itself. Around it, the older houses have become hotels, private residences and a members' club, while the gardens in the middle, with Roosevelt on his plinth and a memorial garden for the victims of September 11, stay open to anyone with a spare quarter of an hour by day.

For a guest planning an evening the conclusion is simple. Within four minutes of the lawns stand some of the best run hotels in Mayfair, each with a different temper, and the choice between them has less to do with stars than with how the night is meant to feel.

The Biltmore, facing the lawns

The largest hotel on the square fills much of its south side. For decades it was a dependable business address; a thorough refit relaunched it in 2021 as The Biltmore Mayfair, part of Hilton's LXR collection, and the front rooms now look straight across the plane trees. The virtue of a large hotel for a private evening is traffic. A lobby that sees weddings, delegations and families checking in at every hour takes no notice whatever of one more well dressed visitor at nine.

Ask for a room on the square side, above the first floor, and for a sitting area if the evening includes supper sent up. Your companion comes in through the front door, crosses a lobby busy enough to make anyone invisible, and finds you in the bar or at the lifts, as you prefer. For a first evening with the Society, Cressida often proposes exactly this pattern: a big hotel, a quiet room and no ceremony at all.

The Beaumont, a minute to the north

Walk north from the square along Duke Street and the mood changes completely. The Beaumont looks onto Brown Hart Gardens, a paved garden lifted above the pavement on the roof of an old electricity substation, and occupies a 1926 building that began life as a garage for Selfridges' customers. It is the most theatrical hotel in the neighbourhood: dark panelling, jazz age lamps, the red leather booths of the Colony Grill Room, and on one corner Antony Gormley's ROOM, a suite set inside a crouching figure of steel. Its sense of humour is part of its charm.

It suits the guest who wants a hotel with a personality and a dinner that never has to leave the building. Samanta, who judges every hotel first by its lobby and its lamps, ranks The Beaumont near the top of her list, and will have found the monogram on the banister before your first drink is poured.

The Twenty Two, where a hotel keeps a club

On the square itself, The Twenty Two opened in 2022 in a grand Edwardian house and runs two things beneath one roof: a small hotel and a private members' club. It answers a question put to Cressida surprisingly often, which is how to spend an evening inside a club without holding a membership anywhere. The honest answer is that the club's rooms keep the club's rules, and what a hotel guest may use is for the hotel to say.

Ask when you reserve exactly which doors your room key opens, and plan the evening around that reply rather than a hopeful guess. For signing in, guest limits and dress across the neighbourhood, the note on members' clubs and their guests goes into the detail.

Claridge's and The Connaught, at the corners

Two of the great London hotels stand just off the square rather than on it. Claridge's is three minutes east along Brook Street, all Art Deco mirror and a guest book full of crowned heads; The Connaught is two minutes south east down Carlos Place, where Tadao Ando's water feature, Silence, sends a thin mist across the pavement outside its door. Both are grander than anything on the square, both are busier after dark, and both have bars that fill with people who already know one another.

The regulars' method is to sleep on the square and drink at the corners. A room at The Biltmore or The Twenty Two, a first glass on Carlos Place, dinner on Mount Street and a slow walk home beneath the trees makes an evening of four settings and not a single taxi. From the hotels on Park Lane, Upper Grosvenor Street brings you to the square in about five minutes on foot.

Weighing a hotel for one evening, not a whole week

A hotel chosen for a week of meetings is not always the right one for a single evening. Five questions settle it.

Cressida's shortlist for the square

Karolina likes to begin on foot, twenty minutes from the square to Brook Street with the story behind each doorway, and to end wherever a piano is being played well. Samanta would rather be found already seated in a lobby she chose for its light. Both stand 174 cm, both belong among the statuesque companions, and both suit the square's cooler, older manners.

For warmth rather than cool, Margo, one of the companions in her thirties, brings a calm to a hotel bar that seems to lower the volume of the whole room. A straightforward hotel evening of an hour or two suits the square well; when dinner is part of the plan, the four hour dinner length at £1,800 fits it best. The full tariff is printed once on the rates page; a first note to Cressida needs only the hotel, the hour and a name, as the booking page explains. For side doors, club floors and lifts that answer to a key, read VIP floors and private entrances.