The focus on youth reflects The Twenty Two’s management: Mirtorabi is 41 and his business partner, Jamie Reuben, is 34, as is the hotel’s managing director Darius Namdar – ex-Chiltern Firehouse, Corbin & King and Mark’s Club. I want older people to feel comfortable and to be part of it but not,” he finishes carefully, “predominantly.” The restaurant at The Twenty Two is open to all © Philip Sinden “We’re open to everyone, and everyone’s welcome to come, but I particularly want it to feel very accessible for a younger generation. It’s a 31-room hotel, all-day restaurant and members’ club for the “creative and curious”, and its guests are invited to “come as you are”, says Mirtorabi. The Twenty Two is intent on doing things differently. It’s not a place where young people go out.” “In the past 20 years it’s become all super-high-end restaurants, super-high-end members’ clubs, and the atmosphere changed. “It used to be that there was a very eclectic crowd there,” explains Mirtorabi, whose hotel career comprises 10 years as owner of Blakes.

While it is very much in Mayfair, in attitude and spirit The Twenty Two is decidedly – strategically – not of Mayfair. Opening this month, hotelier Navid Mirtorabi’s elegant property, The Twenty Two, occupies a sunny corner of Grosvenor Square.

The new embassy officially opened in January 2018.Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. It has received heritage protection, so it will not be demolished even though the embassy moved to a site in Nine Elms, near the Thames, where a new highly-secured glass cube surrounded by a moat was built. The bunker-like embassy building contrasts with the elegant facades from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that surround the square. The massive building is guarded like a fortress, and the street between the embassy and the square has even been blocked off. In 1960 the embassy moved into a modern building designed by the Finnish architect Eero Saarinen, which occupies the west side of the Grosvenor Square. Eisenhower had his headquarters opposite the embassy, which gave the square another nickname: ‘Eisenhower Platz’. In 1938 the American Embassy was established at the square.

lived at 9, Grosvenor Square from 1785 to 1788 when he was the ambassador to the United Kingdom. John Adams, the second president of the U.S. Grosvenor Square is sometimes called ‘Little America’ for its connection with the United States.

20 grosvenor square london w1