So, At Sloane, then, lovely in its low-keyness, situated quietly yet proudly in an 1888 townhouse on a residential street a brief totter from Sloane Square and the King’s Road, part of the 300-year-old Cadogan Estate, and very much a collaboration between it and the Hotel Costes people, who own the place. After a building project lasting six years, there are now 30 rooms and suites arranged over five floors, with a very private yet airy restaurant atop the hotel on a newly constructed sixth floor—the walls of which are decorated with 300-plus vases—and a glorious den of a bar all the way below. (The bar, incidentally, is the only part of this hotel reminiscent of its famed Costes sister across the Channel.)
Photo: Courtesy of At Sloane
And just as the Costes could only really ever exist in Paris, so too could At Sloane only ever be in London. “I’m a very good client of hotels everywhere in the world,” says Graf, “so I love to see what designers are providing. And most of the time I’m a little disappointed, because when I am in Milan, or Paris, or Beijing, I want to be in the city. But most of the time, with hotels today, you could be anywhere in the world. My dream was to do something really English, really London.”
More specifically, if Graf’s sophisticated and historically sensitive rendering of At Sloane is anything to go by, to do something that also spoke volumes about this particular neighborhood in London, where the hotel sits at a kind of crossroads between the area’s streets of white stuccoed residences, the former artistic communities of Chelsea, and the incredible array of 19th and very early 20th-century design to be found at the Victoria and Albert Museum just down the road in South Kensington.