Since 1865, the curved Portland stone facade at the top of Regent Street has anchored one of London's most culturally loaded addresses — a building where Oscar Wilde held court in the Domino Room, where the Bright Young Things of the 1920s made their reputations, and where the Grill Room's gilded excess became a byword for a certain strain of Victorian confidence. Hotel Cafe Royal, which opened in 2012 following a conversion by David Chipperfield Architects, holds 160 rooms across the Grade II-listed Norman Shaw and John Nash-influenced building, threading contemporary hospitality through a structure whose bones resist easy domestication. Chipperfield's approach separates rather than homogenises. The landmark Grill Room — visible here in its full Rococo extravagance, crimson leather tub chairs beneath a ceiling of gilded cartouches and painted panels — was preserved intact as the Oscar Wilde Bar, its mirrors multiplying the ornament into something approaching hallucination. Against that, the guestrooms operate in a cooler register: some wrapped in aged oak linenfold panelling with wide-plank floors and saffron-upholstered beds, others finished in pale stone-effect panelled walls with herringbone parquet and brass reading lamps in a palette of chalk and buttermilk. The Domino Bar, anchored by a curved oxidised-steel counter and deep bottle-green lacquered walls, references the building's bohemian past through a large figurative portrait rather than period pastiche — a distinction Chipperfield's edit maintains throughout.

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