Auburn and red: three companions, three ways of paying attention

Luna is 171 cm with a curving figure, and her hair, long and a deep auburn red, is the darkest of the three; her brown eyes meet yours directly. She dresses to answer the colour rather than calm it, emerald or sharp black tailoring and a red mouth she has no need to check. Wine is her serious study. She tastes blind, names the grape with unnerving accuracy and would begin an evening among the towering shelves on Davies Street, choosing the bottle you will drink at dinner and telling you why. Photography and new plays fill the evenings she keeps for herself.

Lea, 161 cm and petite, wears her auburn hair in long, soft waves, and her hazel eyes carry flecks of gold. Plans, with Lea, are drafts: if something more tempting turns up at nine she will say so, and it usually does. Interiors are her passion, so a dining room remade by an artist, the Gallery at Sketch on Conduit Street, is exactly her kind of room, and she will explain precisely which conventions it ignores. Pottery is her newest pastime, and theatre comes a close second, anything from a big West End musical to a small new play in a room over a pub.

Patricia, 172 cm and slim, keeps her auburn brown hair long and dresses softly, in florals and loose linen through the summer and velvet once the evenings draw in. She paints in watercolour every day, has a weakness for film noir and cannot walk past a bookshop. On Curzon Street she will pick out a novel for a guest after a short conversation, and her choices rarely miss. Guests remember how carefully she listens.

Very little, beyond a room with honest light. Red hair photographs beautifully and turns heads in a lobby, which is worth weighing when discretion matters more than display: of the three, Patricia draws the fewest glances and Luna the most. For a private visit to your hotel the question never arises, and any of the three will arrive as quietly as a guest expected for dinner.

If the evening is built around a bottle, Luna. If it should wander from one room to the next without a timetable, Lea. If it should be quiet, candlelit and end with a book pressed into your hands, Patricia. Whichever you choose, Cressida confirms the hour by return.

Luna shares the curvaceous character and Lea the petite, while Patricia stands with the statuesque and the slim and slender companions. By stage of life, Patricia is the one in her late twenties, and the other two are a few years earlier in the decade. Anyone drawn to dark colouring rather than red will find six names under raven haired.