Jeremy and Chris and Jimmy | The Beaumont Hotel, London

You’d be forgiven for thinking that only one hotel opened in London this autumn. The Mondrian arrived from the USA and slotted into the prime site for tourism, Sea Containers House on the Thames, midway between Tate Modern and the London Eye, as handy for the City as it is for the West End. Tom Dixon has fitted out the interior, and the views, like the original Mondrian in West Hollywood, are handsome. Cue the champagne, the Henry Holland DJ sets, the Simon Costin art-directed “big reveals” that feature cardboard replicas of the Chrysler Building, the floodlighting, the fireworks, the troupe of dancing elephants… Okay, I made that last bit up, but still.

They’re London’s most debonair restaurateurs, and they don’t do launches. They have soft openings and let word of mouth do the rest

But across town, an altogether different event was being curated in hushed tones, lest anyone might overhear. The Beaumont opened its doors after several years of development in Brown Hart Gardens, Mayfair’s most anonymous square, which is dominated by a raised plaza which houses that rare beast, an electricity substation with a baroque exterior. It’s not even a rat-run for taxis any more, thanks to the upheavals caused by Crossrail and the very construction of the Beaumont itself. No matter: Selfridges and North Audley Street are still but a few seconds’ walk away.

“Construction?” I hear you whisper. This art deco masterpiece? Well, yes. Until a short while ago this elegant remnant of twenties swank was in fact a garage.

The façade was always grand but the interior of the Beaumont has been built from scratch. This is, of course, the long awaited latest project of Jeremy King and Chris Corbin, of Wolseley and Delauney fame. They’re London’s most debonair restaurateurs, and they don’t do launches. They have soft openings and let word of mouth do the rest.

But this is a hotel, so Jeremy did one interview, with the FT, where he revealed a third partner in the project, the late Jimmy Beaumont, a scamp who ran New York’s Carlyle in the 1920s but was frustrated by prohibition. “The only people having fun are at the speakeasies,” he complained, promptly jumping ship to set up shop in London, where he threw parties for Hemingway, Fitzgerald and, latterly, Ed Murrow.

Beaumont would have retired in the 1950s and sold out to Hilton, had he, er, ever existed. But he didn’t. Jimmy was purely a whimsical figment of Jeremy’s imagination, and the hotel’s fictional history invented to focus minds and hearts. The day before opening, he confided in me: “I told a staff meeting that I’d found a first edition of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises inscribed To Jimmy. Good luck, Ernest.”

He did fess up eventually. “You do know I’m only joking,” he told his employees. “Don’t you?”

It’s easy to imagine Jimmy buying cocktails at the American Bar, whose walls are lined with monochrome studio portraits of all those Hollywood legends who benefitted from his largesse

Wandering around this buffed-up establishment, across the black and white checkerboard lobby floor, beneath pre-war paintings and period signage (for the “washrooms”), it’s easy to imagine Jimmy buying cocktails at the American Bar, whose walls are lined with monochrome studio portraits of all those Hollywood legends who benefitted from his largesse. Or holding court next door in the damask red leather booths of The Colony, the hotel’s grill room restaurant, which serves those classics the iceberg and blue cheese wedge salad, a finely aged New York strip steak on the bone, and, on Mondays, the intriguingly named Kenny’s Meat Loaf.

Jeremy King and his wife have been assiduously collecting rather fabulous bits and pieces of art deco furniture over the years, and these now grace the Beaumont’s lobbies, bars and 73 bedrooms, looking as if they’ve been there, well, since Jimmy bought them. It’s why it all looks so real.

The result is Room, a work of art which doubles as the hotel’s most expensive accommodation. At a reported £2,500 a night you get to sleep inside the work

Which would be fine, save for one bizarrely modern feature. Outside, there’s an imposing figure stuck on that façade: a three-storey cubist robot fashioned by Antony Gormley, our most respected sculptor, perhaps best known for the Angel of the North. When this latest work was unveiled there were gasps around town. Neither Westminster Council’s planning department nor the Grosvenor Estate, the landlords, are known for their sense of adventure, so the question on everyone’s lips was: “How did they get away with that?”

Oddly, in this one instance, it was Westminster who insisted on a striking piece of modern art to liven up the square. That was the point at which Jeremy excused himself from his meeting with the council to call his pal Antony. The result is Room, a work of art which doubles as the hotel’s most expensive accommodation. At a reported £2,500 a night you get to sleep inside the work, a small suite in which seven steps lead up to an austere, monastic wooden room with a soaring ceiling. When the shutters close, all light is extinguished, in order that the jetlagged and culturally restless can switch off from the outside world.

It’s the kind of place Jimmy would have appreciated in those moments where he either just needed a little quiet, or a place to hide from the Feds. C

The Beaumont, 8 Balderton Street, Brown Hart Gardens, London W1
020-7499 1001; thebeaumont.com