Artist Residence London

This gorgeous small hotel is a bit of a game changer, a new template of British cool, a space designed wholly to exercise your pleasure receptors. It proves resoundingly that small is more beautiful than big ever can be and while large hotels will try to copy it, they’ll fail to pull it off, unable to match the intimacy or the lovely staff who look after you all the way. So what do you get? A small slice of heaven between Pimlico and the King’s Road. It’s a phoenix from the ashes, a Thomas Cubitt pub recently rescued from neglect. Inside, you find fat sofas in front of a roaring fire in the sitting room; pop art and exposed brick walls in the cellar cocktail bar; then the Cambridge Street Kitchen, a lovely new restaurant serving excellent food – banana pancakes for breakfast, crab burgers for lunch and salt marsh lamb with toasted almonds for dinner. Bedrooms are flawless: cool art, chic fabrics, the best beds, power-showered bathrooms. Smaller rooms are divine, bigger rooms have sofas, the suites have free-standing baths. Buckingham Palace and Battersea Park are both close. Don’t miss it.