Ten minutes early on Brook Street, and a room of pictures to spend them in

A room with its own door on Brook Street

The hotel fills most of a block on Brook Street, at the corner where Davies Street comes down from the Elizabeth line entrance of Bond Street station, and its front door is as busy as any in Mayfair. Cars stop, doormen move, luggage goes in and people come out blinking at the light. Further along the Brook Street side of the same building there is a quieter door, and behind it a single exhibition room that the hotel calls its ArtSpace.

It shows changing work, one exhibition at a time, and it is there to be walked into from the pavement. You do not need a room key, a reservation or a reason. The space is small enough to take in from the threshold and large enough to lose ten minutes in, which is the length that matters for this note. This house has no connection with the hotel or with the gallery, and nothing described here is arranged through either. The room is simply a good one to know about.

Why ten minutes in a lobby feel like forty

Anyone who has waited for somebody in a grand hotel knows the difficulty. The foyer is beautiful and entirely public, and standing in it without a purpose makes you part of the decoration. Sit down and a waiter will quite reasonably ask what you would like. Stand near the entrance and you are visibly watching the entrance, which everyone else can see you doing. Ten minutes pass very slowly under those conditions, and they are the ten minutes that set the temperature for everything afterwards.

A gallery removes the problem, because standing still and looking hard at something is the entire point of the room. Nobody wonders why you are there. You can turn your back on the street, give one picture your whole attention and be found, rather than be seen waiting. It is a small difference, and it changes the first minute of an evening completely.

Meeting there instead of at the door

The arrangement is easy to write into a message. Name the hotel you are staying at, say that you would like to meet in the gallery on the Brook Street side at ten to seven, and give Tamsin a length from the ladder. Your companion is told exactly that. She arrives on foot from wherever her car has left her, comes in, and finds you in front of something. No signal is needed and no description of what you are wearing; she has your first name and the room is not large.

What happens next depends on the booking. For hotel hours the two of you walk round to your hotel and go up, and the hour is counted from the minute she came through the gallery door rather than from the moment you reach the lift. If you are staying in that hotel itself the walk is a matter of yards. If you are on Carlos Place, or at one of the hotels on the square, it is three or four minutes on foot, which is a pleasant way to begin.

As on every booking here, the fee goes into her hand directly from you at the start, in the figure Tamsin confirmed, quietly and without ceremony. It never passes through a front desk, and after that moment neither of you mentions it again.

Looking at the work, briefly and well

Exhibitions in a hotel gallery tend to suit their setting: work that rewards a few careful minutes rather than an afternoon. Do not try to see everything. Pick one piece and stay with it, so that when she arrives you already have an opinion, even if the opinion is only that you cannot decide whether you like it. That sentence makes a far better opening than anything about the traffic on Oxford Street.

Most of the women on this list will meet you halfway on a picture, and some will disagree with you, which is better still. None will expect you to know who made it or what it might fetch, and nobody else in the room will care either way. If somebody from the gallery is present, a question about the work is usually welcome. If nobody is, the labels on the wall are enough to be going on with.

The square at the far end of the street

Walk west along Brook Street and within a few minutes you reach Grosvenor Square, the broad, tree lined square that gives this corner of W1K its name and much of its quiet. On a dry evening a slow turn round it is the natural second act after the gallery: long enough to talk, short enough that nobody gets cold. A hotel stands on the square if a lounge and a drink are wanted before going anywhere else, and its lounge is low lit and uninterested in who comes through the door.

If the evening is going further, the note on Mount Street covers the short walk south from here, and explains why almost every building along it is the same warm colour. Mount Street is where most of the good tables within walking distance of the square are to be found, and a guest who has begun in a gallery tends to enjoy knowing what he is walking past.

Who suits a meeting among pictures

Anyone on The Hang can be met in this way, but some women enjoy it more than others. Luna, from the auburn drawer, lives in Mayfair and cares about architecture and old photographs. She arrives a few minutes early by habit and will usually have chosen her picture before you have chosen yours. Angelika is seriously interested in contemporary painting and will hold a view on it quietly, without raising her voice and without backing down.

Tiffany knows the square better than anyone on the list and likes to walk round it before anything else happens, so she is the obvious choice if the gallery is the first stop in a longer evening. Tell Tamsin which of the three you would like and whether the booking is an hour at £250, ninety minutes at £400 or two hours at £500, and the reply will come back with a name and an arrival time.