Annabel's at 46 Berkeley Square — the Richard Caring iteration that opened in 2018, four storeys, £55 million in build cost, a £1,750 joining fee and £3,250 in annual dues — remains the headline private club of Mayfair. But the rooms that the London principal in 2026 actually uses, on the four or five evenings a week they want to be out, are increasingly elsewhere: Fitzrovia, Knightsbridge, Grosvenor Square. Three addresses, three different decades, one shared logic — smaller floorplate, harder list, and the quiet calculation that the most contested room in London is no longer the one with the chandelier in the window.
Mortimer House, on the western edge of Fitzrovia at 37-41 Mortimer Street, runs across six floors of a 1930s Art Deco building. The members' format leans toward the working creative — designers, founders, gallerists — and the day-use programming, the gym on the lower ground, the library, the rooftop terrace, runs through to a calmer evening rhythm than the Mayfair model. The room has, over four years, become the default Fitzrovia answer to the question of where the conversation actually happens between lunch and dinner. The Soho House cohort that has aged out of Greek Street has, in many cases, landed here.
San Lorenzo, at 22 Beauchamp Place in Knightsbridge, is the oldest of the three by a margin. The Bernis opened it on 17 October 1963 — Princess Diana's preferred Italian, Mick Jagger's regular table, the celebrated celebrity canteen of 1980s London. The Beauchamp Place room reopened after renovation as Osteria San Lorenzo and now operates the private rooms upstairs on a closer-to-members'-only logic than the original ever did. The address has, in 2026, become the room the Knightsbridge principal uses for the lunch that Annabel's would feel too theatrical to host. The rooms are small, the wine list is the most carefully kept in SW3, and the door has, after sixty-three years, returned to the discretion the Bernis family originally built it on.
The Twenty Two, at 22 Grosvenor Square, opened in 2022 as a 31-bedroom hotel with a members' club operating across the ground and lower ground floors. Natalia Miyar's interior — opulent, maximalist, paying tribute to the 18th-century French rooms the Edwardian manor was originally built to evoke — has produced the most photographed new room in Mayfair, which is the precise opposite of the discretion the older clubs operate on. The Twenty Two is, by design, the room you take the visiting principal to when they expect London to look like London. The Music Room and the Vault Bar run the late evening. The hotel keys overhead solve the after-hours geometry that Annabel's, with no rooms upstairs, has never been able to address.
Annabel's is not finished — 14,000 names on the reported waitlist, the chandelier in the window still does its work. What has happened, over the four years since the Twenty Two opened and the longer arc that produced Mortimer House and the San Lorenzo renaissance, is that the London map has fractured by neighbourhood and by hour. The Mayfair principal who once took three evenings a week at Annabel's now distributes those evenings across the three quieter rooms. The visiting client gets Annabel's on Friday because Annabel's photographs. The Tuesday lunch happens at Beauchamp Place. The Wednesday dinner happens at Mortimer Street. The hotel night, when the visiting principal stays over, happens at the Twenty Two.
Robin Birley's two rooms — 5 Hertford Street and Oswald's — sit above all four addresses in pure exclusivity terms, and remain a separate conversation. The trio is doing something different: redistributing the city's social geography away from a single Berkeley Square address. The map has moved. The chandelier is still on Berkeley Square. The conversation is no longer.
— Camille Vedy
