Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park, London

The door facing Hyde Park is not the way in. When the hotel opened in 1902 it put its name up in gilt letters on the park front, the King objected, and it took the revoking of an agreement to plant flowers outside and the threat of a trellis screen before the letters came down. The park door was kept back for the royal family, and opening it still takes permission. The address is round on Knightsbridge, at number 66.

Hyde Park Court opened in 1889 as apartments with a gentlemen's club attached, its height having already drawn objections that it would throw a shadow over the Serpentine. Winston Churchill lived here for a stretch and once traded two cigars for an early breakfast. When the SAS was disbanded in 1945 its war crimes investigators carried on anyway, run out of a suite here by the general manager, Brian Franks, who had commanded the regiment in the Vosges the year before. He came back as managing director in 1959.

Joyce Wang redrew every room and suite for the reopening in April 2019, taking the park at ground level as the brief. The studio worked from fallen acorns, their shape read against the crown jewels used at the royal ceremonies the hotel once hosted, and in the rooms that comes through as onyx chandeliers, hand-gilded mirror work, grey panelled walls and Volakas marble in the bathrooms. Of the forty suites, the ones in the turrets run to 47 square metres under a ceiling worked from the pattern of the park's bridle paths, and the larger ones carry a library chosen by the Mayfair bookseller Heywood Hill. In the top suites the butlers are trained by John Lobb, and they send the shoes back polished.

In reception a Fredrikson Stallard piece reduces the plane tree, the park's signature species, to the layering of its bark. Blond burl wood runs through the lobby lounge, and commissioned glass chandeliers hang at the entrance. The ballroom and the loggia carry 24-carat gilding on many original features, both reached from the park through the royal door. That front sits on the route of the Changing of the Guard. The Household Cavalry rides past most mornings.