Side doors, quiet lifts and unlisted floors: the hidden plan of a grand London hotel

A hotel is a small town with several gates

Every grand hotel in W1 was planned for more than one kind of arrival. The front door serves guests with luggage and friends coming in for a drink. A second door, usually on a side street, serves the ballroom and the banqueting suites, so that a charity dinner for several hundred never has to file past the reception desk. Somewhere at the back sits a goods entrance, and the larger houses keep a garage or a covered drive where a car can set someone down out of the rain and out of sight of the street.

None of this is a secret. Architects have laid hotels out this way since the Edwardian era, and the doormen of Mayfair know every opening in their building better than the managers do. What changes from house to house is which of these doors a guest may use, when, and for what.

Doors worth knowing on Park Lane and Piccadilly

Some of the grandest entrances in the neighbourhood are not where a visitor expects them. The Ritz presents Piccadilly with a long arcade, yet its front door is round the corner on Arlington Street, where the cars draw up. The Dorchester sets its entrance back from the traffic of Park Lane behind a forecourt of its own, which turns arrival there into a private moment even at the busiest hour. 45 Park Lane, its small sister a few doors along, has a single discreet entrance and a lobby barely larger than a drawing room.

At the bottom of the lane, where Piccadilly meets Hyde Park Corner, the InterContinental stands roughly where 145 Piccadilly once stood, the townhouse where the future King George VI and his family lived before the abdication altered everything, and which was lost after wartime bomb damage. Like most large modern hotels it separates conference traffic from its lobby, and the bigger towers along the lane route their ballroom guests through side streets for the same reason. Those doors exist for events. They are not a way in for an evening, and nobody should treat them as one.

Club floors, and the lift that asks for a key

The floors the lift panel seems to forget are usually club floors: a level or two of rooms sold together with a private lounge, where breakfast, tea and early evening drinks are served to residents of that floor alone. In many of the larger hotels on and around Park Lane the lift will not rise above the lobby until a room key is held to the panel, and a host often sits at the lounge door.

For a private evening this is an advantage and a small obstacle at once. The advantage is quiet, because corridors on a club floor see very little passing traffic. The obstacle is that a visitor cannot reach you alone. The remedy is easy: collect her downstairs yourself, or tell the front desk that you are expecting someone and ask them to see her up. Hotels do this many times a night and think nothing of it.

Suites with a lift of their own

At the very top of the market, a handful of penthouse and royal suites in Mayfair and Knightsbridge are served by a lift that goes nowhere else, occasionally from a separate entrance at street level. They are booked by heads of state, touring performers and families who travel with security, and the hotel treats every visit to them as a small operation, with a named manager, a butler and a guest list kept at the desk.

If you have taken such a suite, the hotel will already have asked who may come up. Give your companion's first name and the hour she is expected to the butler or the duty manager, and she will be met, accompanied and announced like any other invited guest. It is the most discreet arrangement in London precisely because it is also the most formal.

The Society's rule: the ordinary door

Whatever the building, your companion arrives exactly as any other visitor would. She comes through the main entrance, gives your name at the desk if she is asked for it, and walks to the lift or the bar without hurry. She never uses a staff corridor, a service lift or a fire door, and she will politely decline if anyone suggests it. A hotel's security exists for everyone sleeping in the building, her included, and the Society would never ask her to work around it.

In practice the ordinary door is also the discreet one. A well dressed woman walking through a lobby after dinner is about as unremarkable as W1 gets, whereas someone lingering by a side entrance is the one thing a doorman remembers. A few hotels note every visitor after a certain hour; if yours does, she gives her first name, and a well run house asks nothing further.

A word with the concierge

The words matter less than the tone. A guest who is relaxed about a visitor receives a relaxed reply, and you need not explain who she is; a good concierge will not ask. For hotel and residence visits Cressida only requires the hotel, which name the booking is held in, and the room number, confirmed in writing before your companion leaves, and the booking page sets out that single check. At the hotel end, any one of these sentences is plenty:

From the roster, for a quiet arrival

Samanta reads a lobby the way other people read a face and crosses the grandest of them as though she had checked in the day before. Violetta, at 178 cm the tallest woman on the roster, is used to doormen standing a fraction straighter as she passes. Both belong among the slim and slender companions. Sonya brings the opposite gift, a stillness that makes any corridor feel like her own, and suits a guest whose body clock is still somewhere over the Atlantic. For the square's own hotels, see the Grosvenor Square notes; for a suite opened to friends after dinner, the suite gathering.