Raffles London at The OWO

What opened on Whitehall in 1906 was a Portland stone block of more than a thousand rooms and two and a half miles of corridor, drawn by William Young in 1898 and finished, after his death two years later, by his son Clyde and Sir John Taylor. Churchill ran the department from here as Secretary of State for War, and the building appeared in five Bond films, standing in for MI6 headquarters in the first three.

The Whitehall door opens on a low hall and then the staircase, which starts in one flight and divides to climb three walls of a compartment domed and glazed to the sky, its steps Piastraccia marble, its balusters English alabaster, its handrails Brescia. Thirteen eighteenth-century chimneypieces, bought in 1904 from the department's old premises in Pall Mall, were reset in the offices.

Thierry Despont, who had earlier worked on the Statue of Liberty, took the 120 rooms and suites, five of them Heritage Suites in offices that political and military leaders once used. The Haldane, once Churchill's, joins its neighbours into a six-bedroom wing that sleeps twelve.

Four floors go to the Guerlain Spa, three of them underground, where a twenty-metre pool sits under a double-height ceiling. The Guards Bar sits in one of the rounded corner pavilions, oak-panelled, its bar stools in red leather, with its own entrance facing Horse Guards. The Spy Bar forbids photography.