Why a townhouse makes a club of small rooms
Almost every club in Mayfair lives inside a house that was built for a family, and the architecture explains a great deal. A Georgian terrace house was planned as a stack of modest rooms, one at the front and one at the back on each floor, with the finest pair on the first floor, where the family received its visitors. Turn such a house into a club and the ground floor becomes the bar, the first floor the dining room, and everything above and below divides into small rooms that no renovation can make large.
Those small rooms are the club's private stock. A library with a fire, a panelled room holding a single long table, a sitting room under the eaves with a sofa and a view of chimney pots: most houses have several, and members book them for dinners and gatherings they would rather not hold in public, however select the public downstairs may be.
A snug, a salon and a dining room
The names change from house to house, but the rooms fall into three rough kinds, and knowing which you want saves a round of emails with the club's events office.
How a member secures one
Only a member can book, and the member is expected to be present, to host and to sign. The request goes to the club's events or private dining team, usually by email and usually well ahead; the crowded weeks of December and June are claimed first. The team will ask for a date, a number, an approximate time and the purpose of the evening, and it will normally want the menu and the wine chosen a few days before.
Most houses attach conditions to their private rooms: a minimum spend, a minimum number of guests for the larger rooms, occasionally a hire charge. These vary by club, by room and by night, and they are the events team's to quote, not ours. Ask for them in writing at the start, together with the hour by which the room must be vacated, and nothing on the account will come as a surprise.
An evening behind a closed door
A private room changes the rhythm of a club night. Guests usually gather in the main bar first, which lets them see the house at its liveliest, and are led upstairs when the room is ready. From then on the door stays closed and the evening belongs to the table.
Hotels that lend the same privacy
Anyone without a club can have nearly the same evening in a hotel. The grand hotels around Berkeley Square and along Park Lane all keep private dining rooms, from rooms for a handful of guests to ballrooms, and a number of the restaurants on Mount Street and Berkeley Street keep a room upstairs or behind a screen. The arrangements are much the same: an events manager, a set menu, a spend agreed in advance.
The difference lies mostly in the corridor. A hotel room lends its privacy but not its atmosphere, and there is no club downstairs to drift into afterwards. The remedy is a second venue, a late bar close enough to reach without a coat, and the note on dessert and digestifs elsewhere names several in W1. For members of the two most talked about houses in the district, Annabel's or 5 Hertford Street compares their rooms.
Where a companion fits
In a private room a companion is the member's guest like any other, signed in at the door and seated at the table for the whole evening. She is most useful in the smaller rooms, where a table of six has nowhere to hide a lull: she knows when to ask the question that starts a story and when to let a silence rest. If you are entertaining clients or friends, tell Cressida who is coming and why, and your companion arrives already knowing the shape of the table. Galas and client dinners explains how she is briefed for a working evening; a purely social one needs only a line.
A private dinner usually needs three hours, which cost £1,500, or the dinner date's four. Either can be lengthened if the room is still full at the agreed hour, provided you ask before the time runs out, and the rates page sets out the rest.
Two for a room with the door shut
Patricia is at her best in a small room with soft light, where a guest can be heard properly; she paints in watercolour, cannot pass a bookshop without going in and has a soft spot for film noir, which gives her plenty to say in the pause between courses. The index files her under slim and slender.
Bianka cooks Italian food with real devotion, tastes wine with a pencil in hand and spots an empty glass well before any waiter has. In a private dining room, where the waiter spends much of the evening outside the door, that attentiveness keeps a table in order without anyone seeing it being kept. Either can be suggested by Cressida once you write through booking with the club, the date and the number at the table, and both know Mayfair well enough to recommend the late bar for afterwards.
Asked at the table
No. The booking, the hosting and the bill all belong to a member, who must attend. A guest without a membership can have a very similar evening in a hotel private dining room, which anyone may book.
As soon as the date is known. Weeknights outside December and June can often be arranged within a week or two; the busiest evenings of the year fill much sooner.
She joins the table, as your guest, for the whole of the booking. Nobody at a private dinner waits in the bar for their turn.
Written by Cressida, Membership secretary at Berkeley Square Society. To turn any of this into an evening, write to the desk.
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