Lifestyle | Travel Hotels have long been associated with sex, whether it’s Johnny Depp and Kate Moss allegedly getting intimate in each of Chateau Marmont’s 63 chambres, or Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracey’s extra-marital residence at The Beverly Hills Hotel. Yet few wear their sensuality so boldly as At Sloane, London ’s answer to Paris’s Hotel Costes , with its dim lighting, mood music, heavy perfume and sumptuous interiors — it has more curtains than I’ve ever counted inside one hotel. Even the location feels illicit: there’s only a doorman to signal that a hotel lies behind the doors of 1 Sloane Gardens, a residential enclave tucked behind Sloane Square tube, and according to staffers, several of its neighbours weren’t even aware that it was a hotel for some time.
Opened at the tail-end of 2023 after a six-year renovation project paid for by the Cadogan Estate and spearheaded by Jean-Louis Costes and interior designer Francois-Joseph Graf, the 1888 townhouse (built by Edwin Thomas Hall, the same architect behind Liberty) was gutted and turned into a 30-room hotel, with a subterranean bar and a rooftop restaurant complete with cupola private dining room. Graf took his inspiration from the English arts and crafts movement, local to Chelsea, with vintage WAS Benson light-fittings, William Morris wallpapers and Chartres stained glass. The colour palette is largely monochrome, with pops of red in the downstairs bar and upstairs restaurant, which of course.