Belmond The Cadogan vs The Emory

Sixty-seven keys, and it behaves like a house with sixty-seven keys: staff learn your name by the first night, and the small gestures pile up fast. One couple mentioned an Arsenal game in passing at check-in and found official scarves waiting in their room two nights later. Another family got a teddy bear dressed on their daughter's bed and an anniversary cake they hadn't asked for. General manager Russell Pratt gets thanked by name often enough that he's clearly setting the tone rather than getting lucky once. The Chelsea location, opposite the private garden and a few minutes from Sloane Street and the Kings Road, is the other thing nobody argues with.

The catch is the base room. Deluxe rooms run small for the money, more than one guest has said the photos oversell the square footage, and one traveller was quietly rebooked from a junior suite into a standard room by a third-party booking error, only finding out the day before arrival. Book above the Deluxe category if you can. Wellness is thin too: there's no real spa program, and the gym has simply been shut during at least one recent stay with no fix offered. This is a townhouse, not a resort, and it doesn't pretend otherwise once you're standing in an empty gym.

Suite rooms are where the money is well spent: the marble-and-mosaic bathrooms get called out constantly, and Willetts' risotto and breakfast come up by name rather than as generic five-star box-ticking. One guest fought a billing dispute after a broken radiator went unfixed on night two, the sourest note in months of otherwise glowing accounts. Book a junior suite for the townhouse at its best: the marble bathrooms, Willetts downstairs, and staff who'll know your name by dinner.

The Emory is Maybourne's one real departure from the Claridge's/Connaught script: Richard Rogers' glass box across from Hyde Park, 61 keys, all-suite, barely a lobby, sharing a spa and rooftop with The Berkeley next door. Rooms opened around £1,600 a night and the entry Courtyard Studios still sit near that, which buys floor-to-ceiling glass, a stocked-free minibar, a Cédric Grolet pastry on arrival, and Surrenne downstairs. The Tracy Anderson studio and the snow shower come up before anything else, and one guest who stayed five months called it the best spa experience of a very long trip.

This isn't a hotel that performs the same on night one as it does on night five. That same long-stay guest tracked their own housekeeping scores and found mornings ran measurably better than afternoons, and said outright that a one or two-night stay is too small a sample to judge the place fairly. Shorter stays back that up: a slow check-in, no manager on hand when something goes wrong, a "suite" facing a neighbouring building with the curtains stuck shut for lack of any view. The website oversells too: the welcome champagne, the unpacking service, the non-alcoholic beer add-on don't always show up as promised, which reads less like malice than a property still smoothing its edges two years in. A few guests have also flagged there's no concierge on-site for basics like booking a car, so you're sent next door to The Berkeley.

Book it for the design, the spa, and the quiet if you can give it three nights or more and shrug off an off moment; it isn't built for a single-night stopover. Give it three nights and the butlers, the glass, and Surrenne make the case themselves.