Auguste Kettner, chef to Napoleon III, founded his eponymous Soho restaurant in 1867 in a row of Georgian townhouses on Romilly Street — making it one of London's oldest surviving dining establishments before Soho House Group transformed the building into Kettner's Townhouse in 2018. The conversion added 33 bedrooms across the upper floors while preserving the ground-level rooms that once hosted Oscar Wilde, Edward VII, and Agatha Christie, and the interiors, handled by Soho House's in-house design team, are calibrated to feel less like a hotel renovation than a Soho eccentric's private residence that somehow kept its doors open across two centuries. The rooms layer soot-grey William Morris-style floral wallpaper against burnt-orange velvet sofas and club chairs, freestanding cast-iron roll-top baths positioned in the bedroom rather than hidden away, and dark walnut furniture that carries the patina of something inherited rather than purchased. Downstairs, the Champagne Bar curves around a fluted copper-clad counter topped with Calacatta marble, pendant lamps in crimson silk and a cascading crystal umbrella chandelier overhead lending the whole space a faintly louche Belle Époque warmth. The restaurant beyond retains its original plasterwork cornicing and egg-and-dart mouldings, now painted a dusty sage and furnished with burgundy velvet banquettes — the architecture doing most of the heavy lifting while the design team contents itself with adding carefully chosen friction.

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