Ham Yard Hotel, Firmdale Hotels

At the time of this writing, the Ham Yard Hotel isn’t just the latest Firmdale hotel, it’s also the greatest. Whether it’s the best of them is a matter of taste, but there’s no denying it’s the biggest project our favorite London luxury boutique concern has yet undertaken, a ground-up redevelopment of a little side street in Soho, resulting in what Kit and Tim Kemp call an “urban village.”

And not without reason. For alongside a fairly substantial hotel, there’s also retail space, a restaurant and lounge, a rooftop garden, a 176-seat cinema, and a little four-lane bowling alley in the basement, all along a charming pedestrian thoroughfare complete with a bronze sculpture and a fair bit of greenery. There’s plenty of activity, naturally, but the atmosphere feels a world apart from Piccadilly Circus, scarcely a hundred yards away.

By now you know what to expect from the rooms: peerless modern luxury, outfitted in Kit’s signature style, blending vibrant prints and colors with eclectic antiques and stylish contemporary pieces, all lit by those vast Crittall windows, which manage to make the most of the occasionally anemic London sunshine. You know the service will be first-rate as well, this being far from the Kemps’ first rodeo when it comes to staffing a high-end hotel.

And it’s fair to count on the crowd being an interesting one, if not downright star-studded, the better part of the British theatre and film industries headquartered, as it is, within a shout of Ham Yard (and that basement cinema doesn’t hurt either). Then again, it’s not the star-studdedness of the place, per se, that makes a Firmdale hotel what it is, it’s the fact that it’s more or less impossible to spend the night without feeling like a celebrity guest yourself.