Nicest rooms in London
1 The basement kitchen at Dennis Severs’ House in Spitalfields, E1
At Christmas time, when there are real gingerbread men strung up across the hearth and the candles are lit, it’s so cosy it almost makes you wish you lived in the bad old days.
2 The upstairs lounge at Starbucks’ Oxford Street branch beside Debenhams, W1
No matter how frenetic things get on Oxford Street, there’s always an armchair to slump into (but remember we’ve got first dibs).
3 The Georgian almshouse at the Geffrye Museum, E2
Austere yet elegant, and so atmospheric. Visit on a late winter afternoon and you’ll be transported back to the days of one-room living with a shared coal cellar and a copper tub for your laundry in the basement.
Feature continues
4 The upstairs dining room at Chez Bruce, SW17
It’s quiet and intimate at night, has a great view of Wandsworth Common by day and is painted the colour of blackcurrant Spangles (it goes without saying that the food’s rather good too).
5 The Queen’s Boudoir at Kew Palace
The startlingly vivid decoration – the result of painstaking historical research and consummate craftsmanship – is what makes this room stand out. We love the swirly carpet; it’s time those made a comeback.
6 The bathroom at Eltham Palace
Completely over the top, the gold mosaic bathroom (complete with a statue of the goddess Psyche) is the best thing about the generally spectacular art deco dream house built in 1936 by the Courtaulds.
7 The study at 2 Willow Rd, NW3
With its big desk and view over Hampstead Heath, this room in the 1930s modernist house designed by Goldfinger must be the capital’s most desirable working space (although as it’s in a National Trust property open to the public, you might not get much done).
8 Ray’s Jazz Café, upstairs at Foyle’s bookshop on Charing Cross Road, WC2
This coffee bar-cum-music venue is a comforting ’70s timewarp, all scrubbed boards and communal tables and not an edgy art installation or steel bar stool in sight.
9 The Vault, downstairs at the Hard Rock Shop on Piccadilly
This tiny former bank vault contains furnishings from Jimi Hendrix’s former flat as well as a priceless collection of rock memorabilia.
10 The front bar of the Olde Mitre Tavern, EC1
One of London's oldest pubs, and surely the only one with a cherry tree growing through it, this small, snug, wood-panelled bar looks much as it must have done when Samuel Johnson was a regular.
