Blakes: Behind the Dark Green Doors

A door that gives nothing away

Blakes opened on Roland Gardens in 1978, painted in a green so dark it reads as black from across the street, and it carries no sign of any size to say what waits behind the door. It is widely credited as one of the first hotels anywhere built around a single, deliberate look rather than a chain formula, and the idea has aged well: nothing about the exterior invites a second glance, which is precisely the point for a great many of its guests, then and now.

A companion arriving for an evening visit finds a door that could belong to a private house, a small desk just inside it, and none of the fuss that a grander hotel entrance tends to invite. The street itself, a quiet residential row in South Kensington, adds to the effect: nothing about Roland Gardens marks it out as a hotel address at all until you are standing at the door.

This matters more than it might seem for a first time guest. A companion who has never visited before can be told simply to look for the darkest door on the street, and she will find it without difficulty, which is more than can be said for hotels that rely on a small brass plaque easily missed after dark.

A house dressed for after dark

Inside, the decorating scheme borrows from everywhere at once, antiques and fabrics gathered from China, colonial India and Europe, four poster beds, dark lacquered furniture and lighting kept low enough that a room's colours reveal themselves slowly rather than all at once. It is a look built for evening rather than daylight, and guests who choose Blakes tend to choose it precisely because a room lit like this suits the kind of visit they have in mind.

None of the drama depends on scale. Rooms are not large, and the hotel makes a virtue of that, favouring a single striking detail per room, a lacquered screen, a canopied bed, a wall of dark silk, over the wide, neutral suites more common elsewhere in the district. The effect is closer to a well kept private house than a hotel built to a repeatable template, which is exactly the point of the place, and no two guests describe a stay there in quite the same terms.

Every room differs enough from its neighbour that regular guests tend to develop a favourite, and the hotel is generally happy to confirm which room a booking will use ahead of arrival if a particular one is requested.

Discretion as a design choice

The hotel has always run smaller and quieter than its reputation suggests, no lobby bar spilling onto the street, no large windows onto Roland Gardens, and staff long practised at treating an evening guest as exactly that, a guest. This is not a policy adopted for one particular kind of booking; it is simply how the building has worked since Anouska Hempel first painted the door, which is why it suits a companion visit as comfortably as it suits anyone else who values a quiet arrival.

That reputation has held for decades precisely because the hotel never advertised its discretion loudly. It simply built a small, unmarked, low lit house and let word travel the way it always does among people who value exactly that, a slower, quieter kind of marketing than most hotels attempt today. Staff turnover is famously low for a hotel of its size, which means the same faces tend to greet returning guests year after year, another quiet form of discretion in itself: nothing needs re-explaining on a second or third visit.

Booking a visit

The process here is the one used everywhere on this site: name the hotel, the date, the hour and the length you have in mind, and the desk checks your full name and room number over WhatsApp before anyone sets off. A quarter of the fee, paid by bank transfer, holds a standard hotel visit, and the rates page carries every length from an hour upward.

Because rooms run smaller here than at some SW7 addresses, a two hour booking tends to suit the space better than a longer one taken purely for its own sake, though nothing stops a guest choosing whichever length the evening actually calls for. An overnight in a room this deliberately lit is, for the right guest, one of the more memorable versions of that booking on the whole ladder.

The dining room below stairs

Blakes keeps its restaurant below street level, candlelit and small enough that a table for two never feels like it is competing with the room next to it. It works well for a booking that opens with dinner in the building itself rather than a walk elsewhere, especially on an evening when neither person particularly wants to step back outside once they have arrived. The room shares the hotel's taste for low light and rich colour, so the evening barely changes register between the table and the stairs back up.

A short walk from South Kensington's other addresses

Roland Gardens sits close enough to Old Brompton Road and the museum quarter that a companion travelling from elsewhere in South Kensington reaches Blakes with no real delay, and guests who spend an afternoon at the V&A or wandering the mews streets nearby find the hotel an easy few minutes' walk from either. The street's residential quiet also means a taxi arriving late at night draws no particular notice, one more small advantage of a hotel tucked among private houses rather than fronting a main road.

Companions who suit the mood

Tiffany already treats Blakes as a favourite first stop, a glass of champagne taken in the theatrical gloom of the bar before anything else begins, and the hotel's dark, layered rooms match her own taste for design exactly. Luna, bold and quick to hold an opinion, is just as at home here, more inclined to notice the antiques from across three continents than to be intimidated by the low light. Tiffany is filed among the petite companions in the collection and Luna among the curvaceous, and both bring a confidence that a smaller, moodier hotel rewards more than a grand, brightly lit lobby ever could.