Rosewood London

Pearl Assurance kept its head office here from 1914 until 1989, in an Edwardian Baroque pile listed since 1974. Portland stone and granite run five storeys up from a rusticated base to attics and two more floors of dormers, Ionic columns rise through the middle floors, and leaded domes cap the central tower and both end bays. The insurers also built themselves a staircase in Pavonazzo marble.

It climbs all seven floors, restored along with the dome and the listed frontage by EPR Architects for the reopening as Rosewood London in October 2013. Tony Chi and Martin Brudnizki drew the interiors. Seven of the 44 suites are called houses rather than suites, Holborn and Chancery and Lincoln and Cupola among them, and the Grand Manor House Wing runs to six bedrooms across 587 square metres behind a private entrance and its own lift. The wing has a postcode of its own.

The courtyard does the work a garden does elsewhere, a summer terrace off the brasserie. Scarfes Bar hangs ten-foot oils of Gerald Scarfe's caricatures on marble walls and rewrites its cocktail list around them every year, while the brasserie keeps more than 320 gins on a copper-topped bar. Cats and dogs stay free, barred only from the spa and the gym. Every restaurant and bar takes them.