The Peninsula London

Hopkins Architects built the place new to sit with its heritage neighbours, and Peter Marino drew the rooms, the lobby and the two floors of spa underneath. All 190 rooms and suites have a mahogany-panelled dressing room and a bathroom of honey onyx and marble. The pictures in them are landscapes, commissioned from more than forty artists at the Royal Drawing School.

Higher floors turn towards Hyde Park Corner. The Arch Suite opens Juliet balconies straight onto Wellington Arch, while the Peninsula Suite takes 470 square metres of the sixth floor, with a fireplace and a baby grand in the living room, a private gym, a thirteen-seat screening room and a lift of its own. A telescope stands in the larger of its two living rooms.

Brooklands sits on the eighth floor with a scale model of Concorde hung above the dining room and Claude Bosi's kitchen under it. The bar beside it takes its latticed ceiling from the geodetic airframes Barnes Wallis designed at Brooklands, and its chandelier fans out glass blades in the shape of a jet turbine. Canton Blue does Cantonese on the ground floor, and The Lobby carries de Gournay murals of the Royal Parks.

The 25-metre pool sits in a double-height room underground, its upper walls tiled in mosaic tree canopies and its light coming from panels in the ceiling. That daylight is manufactured.