Number Sixteen

Number Sixteen is the smallest of Firmdale's three London townhouse hotels, a row of white stucco Victorian terraces on Sumner Place, a short walk from the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington. Forty-one bedrooms, each individually decorated by Kit Kemp, sit above a ground floor built around two sitting rooms — a Drawing Room hung with a butterfly-and-moth diptych and a Library papered in geometric yellow and green. Behind the house is a walled private garden, with a koi pond, a climber-covered archway and a lattice-roofed garden pavilion.

The Orangery is the house's one bookable space: a glass-roofed conservatory in dusky pink, hung with folk textiles and lit by a ring of candles, that opens through double doors onto its own terrace. It takes private hire for a wedding reception, a civil ceremony, private dinners or a cocktail party, seating ten at the table or up to fifty for a standing reception across the room and terrace together. The garden beyond stays reserved for hotel guests rather than private-hire parties.

This is a townhouse hire, not a hotel-wide events floor: a single room and its own terrace, better suited to a small private gathering than a party built to fill a function suite.