Batty Langley’s

Within a Georgian house in a trendy corner of East London, once home to Huguenot silk weavers, Peter McKay and Douglas Blain set out to weave a fantasy of their own. And to whom should they turn but that great, eccentric arbiter of 18th-century style, Batty Langley, with his ‘Great Variety of Grand and Usefull Designs’. As at London sister properties Hazlitt’s and The Rookery (see entries), to enter is ‘like walking into another century’. Interiors are filled with antiques, books, paintings, rich velvets, tapestries. Kitty Fisher’s boudoir has a carved four-poster, a balcony, a Victorian canopy bath. The Earl of Bolingbroke suite has a canopy bed built for a bishop, a Tuscan marble bath, a ‘secret throne toilet behind a bookcase’. Some rooms have ‘a “theatre bath” behind a curtain’. A box-room single is ‘cosy and characterful’. Relax by the fire in a book-lined library with a drink from the honesty bar. Order chicken pie or a baguette from a room-service menu. Despite the historic feel, you have all mod cons here, and if you want to know how life was without them, visit neighbouring Dennis Severs’ House, which reeks of the 1700s.