Brown's Hotel, a Rocco Forte hotel

The hotel opened round the corner at 23 Dover Street, where James Brown added 21, 22 and 24 as the business grew, and it was the Ford family, who bought it next, that carried the place through to Albemarle Street. A room here is still described by what it faces, the inner courtyard or Dover Street or Albemarle Street.

Olga Polizzi redesigned the bedrooms, no two decorated alike, and the suites carry names rather than numbers, one for Clara Dow, the English soprano photographed on Dover Street, another for the 1939 ballad about a nightingale in Berkeley Square, a third for the composer Muzio Clementi. Rudyard Kipling arrived on his wedding night and kept coming back for forty-four years, and his suite looks over Albemarle Street. Paul Smith has three bedrooms over Dover Street.

The Drawing Room sits at the front behind its original panelling, pouring afternoon tea by day and turning over to jazz on Thursday evenings. The Donovan Bar takes its name from Terence Donovan and hangs his black and white photographs the length of its walls, with a nineteenth century stained glass St George behind the bar. The racier ones are gathered in the Naughty Corner.

Charlie's, the restaurant, is named for Lord Charles Forte, and Adam Byatt's menu there keeps roast beef and venison en croute on a gilded trolley, carved at the table, in a room of velvet banquettes. His grandfather worked here before him.