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.

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.

This corner of Marylebone has grown increasingly hip in recent years, and the opening of the Nobu Hotel London Portland Square feels like an exclamation mark. And while the crowd and the vibe will necessarily differ in certain ways from the first Nobu hotel, in the arty East London district of Shoreditch, the experience is a no less memorable one: inspired interiors, lavish luxury, and a very fine restaurant, all under one roof.

In London, the hotel world’s majorest of major leagues, even the big chains know which way the wind is blowing — away from that fusty manor-house look, and toward something altogether more clean-lined and contemporary. Nobody’s about to mistake the old May Fair for the Sanderson, but it’s plain they’ve learned some lessons from the new breed of design hotels.

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.

The old Bow Street Magistrates’ Court has seen some history, including Oscar Wilde’s prosecution; only fitting, then, that the NoMad London, set in this venerable Covent Garden landmark, should pay tribute to the patron saint of dandies with vibrant, romantic, bohemian interiors by the design duo Roman and Williams.

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.

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.

Named for the section of a song where new, contrasting material is traditionally introduced, Middle Eight aims to do something similar for Covent Garden: adding something vibrant and memorable to the neighborhood that’s nevertheless recognizably a part of its surroundings. The immediate setting, Great Queen Street, lies just beyond the end of Long Acre, Covent Garden’s main drag, and places the hotel within walking distance of no end of shops, restaurants, bars, and theatres.

South Place Hotel offers a pitch-perfect lesson in some of the most exciting changes taking place in London — from its eastward-moving hotel scene to its most forward-thinking designers to its up-and-coming visual artists — but instead of some didactic bore, your instructor is a witty, über-savvy hotelier eager to show you a fantastic time. Of course if your hotel search has led you this far east on the map, you likely already know that the City of London and its surroundings are no longer just where Londoners work — home to one of the world’s great financial centers — but increasingly where they drink and dance and dine, far from the heavily trafficked circus of Piccadilly. And with a rooftop bar that was a coveted nightlife destination practically before it opened (LCD Soundsystem’s Nancy Whang dropped in for one of the initial DJ sessions alongside the house act), South Place knows how to play.

The Ampersand, a whimsical South Kensington hotel with a name to match, is so unabashedly, eccentrically British that it would risk self-parody if it weren’t so dashingly pulled together. Housed in an 1888 townhouse, the hotel takes the Victorian taste for eclecticism — curiosities and objets d’art abound — and gives it a thoroughly modern look. It’s a fitting style for a neighborhood whose shops run from indie boutiques to Stella McCartney to Harrods, and whose cultural institutions contain everything from the classic collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum to the irreverent pop-culture photography of the Proud Gallery.

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.

Long one of London’s favorite residential neighborhoods, Notting Hill has finally got a boutique hotel that’s perfectly suited to its setting. The Laslett’s 51 rooms and suites span a row of five Victorian townhouses, less than a minute’s walk from the Notting Hill Gate underground station, which means the rest of the city is convenient as can be — but while you’re here, you’re perfectly placed at the nexus of creative West London.

Located in Bethnal Green, Town Hall Hotel lies a short distance eastward of London’s traditional hospitality centers — a slight remove which, depending on your feelings about the touristic thrum of London’s traditional hospitality centers, may very well count as a merit. Bethnal Green these days, of course, has plenty to recommend it, and one shudders at the thought of what a night at Town Hall might cost were it located in the West End. A fifteen-minute Tube ride from central London is the non-pecuniary price you pay for rooms that are spacious, apartments that are downright sprawling, and services — not just a spa but an indoor pool as well — that would set you back thousands at the center of the city.

For years the City of London was a place to find the most flavorless luxury hotels imaginable; bankers and financiers, presumably, were thought to be allergic both to historical hotels and to memorable modern design. Those days, happily, are over, and it’s a good thing, because a hotel like Vintry & Mercer would have been unthinkable under the old rules. It gets its name from its location between two historical guild halls, one for the wine trade and another for textile merchants, and it takes its visual inspiration from the romance of an era when business travel was quite literally an adventure.

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