Hazlitt's

Peter McKay and Douglas Blain opened Hazlitt's hotel in 1986 inside the Frith Street townhouses where the essayist William Hazlitt died in 1830, a fact recorded on the blue plaque by the front door. There is no sign announcing the hotel from the street, and guests are buzzed into a Georgian interior dating to 1718, furnished throughout with more than 2,000 period paintings and prints across thirty rooms named after past residents and visitors. McKay and Blain later opened two more townhouse hotels on the same principle, The Rookery in Clerkenwell and Batty Langley's in Spitalfields, but Hazlitt's remains the original, run without a hotel chain's uniformity.