45 Park Lane

45 Park Lane is the small one in the Dorchester Collection's London pair — forty-five rooms and suites facing Hyde Park, directly across the road from The Dorchester. The building has a past: an office block of the early 1960s that spent its best-known years as the London Playboy Club, before Thierry Despont stripped it back and reopened it as a hotel in 2011. His interiors are modern art deco rather than period pastiche, and the art is real: works by Damien Hirst hang in the restaurant, and the lobby is a compact, lacquered arrival room in rosewood and marble rather than a grand marble hall.

The hotel houses CUT at 45 Park Lane, Wolfgang Puck's only European restaurant, a 76-cover modern American steak room in red leather and dark timber, with a terrace on Stanhope Gate. Sushi Kanesaka sits behind a discreet door on the same floor, and BAR 45 — panelled, low-lit, reached by a staircase to the mezzanine and known for a negroni trolley wheeled to the table — runs a resident DJ on Friday and Saturday nights. That is unusual for a hotel bar of this size, and it is the reason the room works for a private party rather than just a drink.

Be clear about the scale: this is not a ballroom hotel. Its dedicated event space is the Media Room, a first-floor private dining room for twelve seated or twenty standing, built around a large screen and available as an extension to BAR 45. The larger option is CUT itself, which takes private dining, group dinners and cocktail receptions across the restaurant floor. For an intimate, music-led evening in Mayfair — a birthday, a launch dinner, a private reception with a DJ — the format is right; for several hundred guests it is the wrong address.