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

Crosby Street is exactly the kind of hotel New York 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 inimitable Kemp style continues to evolve. Warren Street was designed by Kit and her daughters Willow and Minnie, and the result is somehow even more packed with pattern, texture, and color than ever — in stark contrast with the minimalist styles that once defined Downtown Manhattan style. Each of its 69 rooms and suites is unique, though obviously cut from the same vast and eclectic collection of cloth.

The setting for the Charlotte Street Hotel 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.

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.

A ground-up redevelopment of a little side street in Soho, Kit and Tim Kemp call Ham Yard an “urban village.” And not without reason. For alongside a fairly substantial hotel, there’s also retail space, a restaurant and lounge, a rooftop garden, a 176-seat cinema, and a four-lane bowling alley, all along a charming pedestrian thoroughfare complete with a bronze sculpture and a fair bit of greenery.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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