Number Sixteen is either the coziest boutique hotel in London, or the most luxurious bed and breakfast — we’re still not sure. The location, down a sleepy side street in South Kensington, is fairly well hidden; just a row of nineteenth-century Victorian townhouses without so much as a sign to show the way. As a member of Firmdale’s Townhouse Collection, it’s a more low-key experience than the bigger, more lively Ham Yard or Soho Hotel — Number Sixteen is notable for its intimate scale and its quiet charm.

Now if we didn’t greatly admire the (smallish, intimate, service-oriented) Firmdale philosophy, and consider ourselves huge fans of Ms. Kemp’s design style, we might be less excited about a London-based mini-chain expanding into New York. But a hotel like Crosby Street is exactly what this city needs. The contrast between the downtown grit of the cobblestone street outside and the plush sophistication of the hotel’s lobby is immediate, and striking. Say what you will about the bright colors and the decidedly un-minimal décor — it’s a rare New York boutique these days that presents so opinionated a face to the world.

The Whitby Hotel brings the warmth and coziness of English hospitality to a neighborhood that’s already got plenty of American-style luxury hotels, and proves that Firmdale can compete with anyone in the world on comfort, and look just that much more stylish and charming while they’re at it.

The Knightsbridge Hotel is the perfect modestly priced entrée into one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the world. In fact the Knightsbridge is the ideal shopper’s hotel, a sort of junior version of its sisters, Covent Garden and Charlotte Street, with a correspondingly lower nightly rate, leaving plenty of room on the credit cards for expeditions to Harrods and Harvey Nichols, as well as the shops of Sloane Street and Brompton Cross.

Longtime Kemp-watchers — there must be more than a few of you out there — might remember that the Dorset Square Hotel was Tim and Kit’s first venture, a sort of rough draft for their extremely successful Firmdale Hotels brand. It was eventually sold off, but not forgotten — now a decade and a half later it’s back in the Firmdale fold, and there’s nothing at all rough about it.

At the time of this writing, the Ham Yard Hotel isn’t just the latest Firmdale hotel, it’s also the greatest. Whether it’s the best of them is a matter of taste, but there’s no denying it’s the biggest project our favorite London luxury boutique concern has yet undertaken, a ground-up redevelopment of a little side street in Soho, resulting in what Kit and Tim Kemp call an “urban village.”

London’s Soho Hotel is impossibly glamorous, a luxury boutique that is at once classic and original — classic in the now-familiar London sense of overstated and outsized comfort, robust and enveloping furnishing and fixtures (as compared to the papier-mâché set construction in lesser boutiques) and original in its avoidance of worn-out tropes like featureless white rooms, cheap ‘Zen’ minimalism and off-the-rack hotel-standard furniture.

The setting is Bloomsbury, and the interiors pay plentiful tribute to the neighborhood’s cultural heritage, displaying original artworks by the storied Bloomsbury Set themselves. You’re equidistant from the British Museum and the theatres of the West End, so if you leave without taking in a bit of culture, it’s nobody’s fault but your own.

On a narrow side street in the bustling and chic Covent Garden district of London’s West End, this splendidly theatrical small hotel’s exclusive atmosphere and central location make it the perfect London pied-à-terre for visiting actors, professional shoppers, and savvy yet indulgent travelers. The opera house and the theatre district are close by, as are the West End’s best shops and boutiques — and yet the hotel itself is stunning enough you may have trouble dragging yourself outside.

Haymarket Hotel is among the younger hotels in the Firmdale group — or shall we call it a family? We’re disposed to think of Number Sixteen, the Knightsbridge, Soho Hotel and all the rest of the group’s other London hotels as instant classics: luxury-hotel values on a boutique-hotel scale, with a unique design personality courtesy of Kit Kemp. What’s not to love?

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