The Rex Rooms

The address did the heavy lifting long before the current name went up. 151 King's Road spent three decades as 151, the basement the Chelsea set aimed for at the end of a night, and it lost its lease after the pandemic. In March 2025 the room reopened as The Rex Rooms, under the designer and nightlife operator Marc Jacques Burton with Piers Adam, Jason McNab and Mark Cecil. It has been drawing the same order of crowd the basement always did.

Burton worked the interiors up with the Soho studio Quadrant Design, and the reference is Surrealism by way of Gaudí. Guests come down a staircase into a purple hall with a convex mirror, then into the main lounge, where hand-carved timber runs across the walls and up onto a backlit webbed ceiling. The bar is a single carved slab pierced with organic openings, standing on a wave-patterned black and white mosaic floor. Behind a door in that room is the 1942 King's Room, a narrow, mirrored space of velvet banquettes framed by sculptural wooden panels, with a dried-flower canopy overhead. Phones stay down in there; the privacy is the point.

Both rooms take private hire, separately or together, and the whole venue holds 200 standing. There are two bars, positions for more than one DJ, and a licence that runs to 3.30am. Outside catering is allowed, which is unusual for a room of this kind and useful for a dinner that turns into something later.