Some of London’s luxury boutique hotels are so tasteful they’re almost invisible, catering to guests who want a blank canvas on which to project their own personalities. And then there’s the Mandrake. Set in a relatively sleepy section of Fitzrovia, it’s nevertheless nothing short of a fantasy world, a moody, atmospheric 34-room boutique hotel surrounding a central courtyard full of hanging jasmine and passionflower.

One of London’s boldest luxury hotels takes its inspiration from across the Atlantic — the Beaumont Hotel is meant to evoke the glamour and the rush of a fictional Roaring Twenties New York member’s club. It’s in Mayfair, between Grosvenor Square and Selfridges, and despite its American accent, it’s about as Mayfair as a 21st-century hotel can get, right down to the brash, slightly puzzling piece of quasi-public art that adorns its Twenties Art Deco facade.

Don’t be fooled by the name — the Experimental Cocktail Club is more than just an adventurous group of drinkers. They’ve got bars by that name in Paris, New York, and London, as well as a couple of excellent Parisian boutique hotels and some highly regarded London restaurants. And now they’ve added the Henrietta Hotel & Restaurant to their portfolio, in what might just be the very heart of central London: Covent Garden.

The thought of a Spanish luxury chain moving into central London is the sort of thing that could ordinarily be counted on to attract a bit of criticism. But in point of fact, it’s hard to imagine a hotel that’s much more quintessentially English than ME London. It’s housed in a new building designed by Foster + Partners, and located at one end of the Strand’s central Aldwych Crescent, an iconic location if ever there was one. This new build is an addition, really, an outgrowth of a thoroughly renovated 1904 building which was the first home of the BBC, and the original headquarters of the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company — proof in itself that London’s never been shy about admitting the occasional overseas influence.

Let’s be clear right at the outset that the neighborhood in which Flemings Mayfair makes its home is the classic Mayfair, the accessible Mayfair, the down-to-earth Mayfair — not the chilly neighborhood whose streets seem to be populated exclusively by German-made saloons and their military-trained drivers, loitering outside discreetly hidden hedge funds, but the neighborhood that stitches together the best things about London: picturesque residential charm, classic architecture, and close proximity to the parks, the sights, and some phenomenal shopping.

The London hotel scene is something of a proving ground for new trends in the hotel business — but you’d have to look long and hard at 11 Cadogan Gardens to find any evidence of progress. This is a hotel that delights in keeping to the trailing edge rather than the cutting one, a small monument to old-fashioned hospitality and a reminder of a time long past.

Prepare for a slight case of culture shock — the old Cox’s and King’s bank on the corner of Waterloo Place and Pall Mall, just around the corner from the Piccadilly Circus tube station, is now the place to go in London for a little taste of Paris. Today owned by the French Sofitel chain, it’s had a makeover courtesy of designer Pierre-Yves Rochon, and now sports a fine French brasserie.

Though a rated historical building, the Sixties office block that housed the Sanderson fabrics company is not the most elegant facade for a stylish boutique hotel. Fortunately the interiors find Starck and Schrager in rare form, raising their game a bit to stand out in this most competitive of hotel markets. Though constrained a bit by the building’s landmark status (right down to the name, which was the path of least resistance considering the old Sanderson sign had to stay) they have created what may be their partnership’s most urbane and elegant environment yet.

Nobu is better known in London for its standalone restaurants than for its hotels, but with the advent of the Nobu Hotel Shoreditch, that might be about to change. On the back of successful hotel openings in Asia and the Americas, the famous sushi concern has chosen London’s hottest neighborhood for its first European hotel, and the result is more or less exactly what you’d predict — which, in Nobu’s case, is a good thing indeed.

A Whitehall address necessarily carries with it a certain cachet, and on that score the Corinthia Hotel London doesn’t disappoint. Built in the 19th century as the Hôtel Métropole, this building later housed the Ministry of Defense. Now it’s back to its original purpose as an impossibly glamorous luxury hotel, complete with seven extravagant penthouse suites, a massive Baccarat chandelier in the lobby, a spa that expands over four floors, and even a miniature Harrod’s department store.

It takes some confidence to call a new hotel something like The Londoner; but it also takes some confidence to replace the old Odeon Cinema West End with a hotel that towers eight floors above Leicester Square, with a further six levels below ground. It’s conceived as a “super-boutique” hotel, which aims to marry the character and personalized service of a boutique with the large scale and extreme comforts of a high-end luxury operation.

There was a time, not so very long ago, when modern minimalism in boutique hotels was all the rage, and the Portobello Hotel was looking doubly out of step — London’s original rock & roll hotel was showing its age, and its eclectic, bohemian style looked like something of a relic. Things change, of course, and today, not only is the Portobello’s brand of highly textured romance very much back in fashion, but the hotel itself has seen a pretty impressive restoration, and you can well imagine it’ll be adding to its long list of slightly risqué tales.

London was among the birthplaces of the luxury hotel, and it was an early adopter of the boutique-hotel trend as well. But the most uniquely London form of hospitality just might be the member’s club. These meeting places have historically been approximately one part shared workspace to two parts secret society, and they’re exclusive by nature — not simply exclusive in the modern sense, meaning “expensive,” but truly selective about its clientele. Lately, though, a few of them, like Marylebone’s venerable Home House, have offered another path to (temporary) membership: if you can demonstrate that you’ve got the good taste to book a room for the night, then you’re a member for the duration of your stay.

Naming a hotel after a neighborhood is a clear sign that your aim is to more or less sum the place up, and in that the Marylebone succeeds. Once an outlying village, now part of central London, Marylebone itself is an odd mix: its quiet, rather posh residential neighborhoods and its smallish, highly individual retail offerings lie within striking distance of Oxford and Bond Streets, home to some of the world’s best (and busiest) shopping, not to mention Hyde Park and, at a stretch, the theatres of the West End. Not a bad all-purpose home base for a visit to the capital, and not a bad place for a boutique-influenced luxury hotel like the Doyle Collection’s Marylebone.

Brutalist architecture is back in a big way — good news for London, which is practically swimming in the stuff. The old Seventies-era Camden Town Hall Annexe, just opposite St Pancras Station in King’s Cross, has lived long enough to evolve from an architectural pariah into something precious. After a number of developers came close to demolishing it, in swooped the Standard hotel group, who rightly saw a bit of their own aesthetic reflected in its orderly Modernist geometry. The Standard, London is the brand’s first outside of America, and it’s a perfect fit for this newly hip North London neighborhood.

This is a building whose fame, paradoxically, ends up obscuring it — “Scotland Yard” now refers to wherever the Metropolitan Police headquarters is, and the name followed the agency when it moved, over a century ago, into new digs closer to Westminster. Now Great Scotland Yard, the original Edwardian brick edifice, is back in circulation, this time as a luxury hotel in Hyatt’s Unbound Collection.

St Martins Lane has set the bar for quite some time in London’s boutique scene, showcasing Philippe Starck’s trademark irreverence in stark contrast to the English urban-country-house norm. Tim Andreas built on that ethos — a potent blend of zany, baroque, and minimalist elements —with his interiors, an update on the tried-and-true “urban resort” theme.

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