ME London

Foster + Partners' first hotel anywhere, ME London rises at the bend of the Strand where it meets Aldwych, behind a sheer Portland-stone prow. The architects designed everything here, inside and out, and the result is a building organised around one extraordinary gesture: a nine-storey atrium clad entirely in white marble, narrowing to a triangular glass apex that throws shafts of daylight down through the core. Black marble corridors wrap the void; the bedrooms radiate outward toward the river and the rooftops. It is the rare luxury hotel that reads as a single, deliberate piece of architecture rather than a collection of decorated rooms.

The drama continues vertically. On the tenth floor, Radio Rooftop has reopened under a pan-Asian concept, all warm terracotta tones, sculpted ceilings and a retractable roof, with resident DJs at weekends and one of the best skyline panoramas in the West End: Somerset House in the foreground, St Paul's and the City towers to the east, the Shard and the Thames beyond. At street level, STK brings its louche, music-led steakhouse, dark ceilings, violet light, a DJ booth and circular leather booths that turn dinner into a party.

For private events, the hotel's lower-ground floor holds the ME Room and a run of interconnecting studios that open into one another, with in-house catering and an events team handling AV, lighting and dressing. The duplex Suite ME crowns the building across the ninth and tenth floors for intimate penthouse dinners with a terrace over the river. Between the rooftop's late licence, STK's resident booth and the marble theatre of the atrium, this is a building built for music as much as for views.