Hotel and residence visits, from the Tube to your door

South Kensington is a district of small, carefully run hotels, and most visits begin within a few streets of the station. The Ampersand on Harrington Road, Number Sixteen on Sumner Place, The Kensington on Queen's Gate and the Baglioni on Hyde Park Gate are all familiar addresses, as are the serviced apartments strung along Cromwell Road towards Gloucester Road. On the W8 side, the Royal Garden Hotel and The Milestone both look across Kensington Gardens, and a companion reaches either from Kensington or SW7 in a few minutes by taxi.

Private homes are visited on precisely the same terms. A mansion flat, a mews house, a garden square apartment rented for the week: each is treated like a hotel room, with the building and flat checked where a room number would otherwise be.

Four details are enough to begin, and the desk asks for anything left out.

Before she leaves home, the desk runs a short check over WhatsApp, pairing the name on the reservation with the hotel and the room. The deposit follows, and a written confirmation with her arrival time comes back as soon as the transfer shows. Across SW7, W8 and SW3, most visits begin inside an hour of that confirmation, and a visit booked for later in the week is simply held until the agreed time. She sends a short message when she is close, so nobody waits in a corridor, and she allows fifteen minutes of grace should you be running behind. Beyond that point the desk offers a new time rather than a shortened visit.

Some guests like the directness of a room number; others would rather meet over a drink first. Both are ordinary requests. Name the bar, the drawing rooms at The Ampersand or the lounge at The Kensington for instance, and she will look for you there, heading upstairs with you once the drink is finished. Some hotels register late visitors at the front desk; if yours is one of them, mention it when you write. She follows the hotel's own procedure without any awkwardness, and nothing about the visit is charged to your room.

She crosses a lobby the way any expected evening visitor does: coat on, phone away, walking towards the lifts without hesitation. There is no need to meet her at the entrance or to warn the concierge. She leaves in the same unremarkable way, and neither passage is memorable to anyone but you.

An hour suits a late arrival: a drink, a proper conversation, the day set down. Ninety minutes leaves time to order something from room service. Two hours is where regular guests tend to settle, because at that length nobody looks at a watch. Three hours begins to feel like an evening in its own right, and anything longer is better written as a dinner date or an overnight. To extend once she has arrived, raise it before the booked time ends; if her diary is clear, the visit steps up the ladder and the difference is settled with the balance.

When time is short, geography helps. Milena, Danielle and Thea all live in South Kensington, a few minutes from most SW7 lobbies, so a late message about a room near the museums is an easy one to answer. Michelle and Cindy are based in Chelsea, a short ride south along the Fulham Road. Milena and Danielle both hang in the raven haired room of the collection, for guests who choose by look as well as by distance.