Behind the white stucco: Belgravia's small hotels and their private-house manners

Almost everything you see in Belgravia was built within a few decades. From the 1820s the master builder Thomas Cubitt laid out its squares, crescents and terraces for the Grosvenor family, and the result is the most coherent piece of Regency and early Victorian London still standing: cream stucco, black railings, porticoes on every door and garden squares locked behind them.

Streets like these were never meant for large hotels, and very few have been squeezed in. What Belgravia has instead is a handful of small, independent houses, some converted from terraces, some purpose built but modest in scale. They share a set of habits that suit a private evening remarkably well. Corridors are short, floors hold only a few rooms, and the person at the desk tends to learn your name by the second morning.

That intimacy cuts both ways. A small lobby means your guest is greeted rather than absorbed into a crowd, so the arrival should be simple and expected. Handled well, it feels less like a hotel visit and more like arriving for supper at a friend's house in Belgravia, which is exactly the spirit these places are built on.

The Hari stands on Chesham Place, a few steps from Belgrave Square, in a building with a light, contemporary interior behind its period front. Its ground floor restaurant, Il Pampero, is small enough to feel like a private dining room, and it is the Belgravia table that Bianka loves most. She opens the wine list at its last pages, where the curious bottles live, and orders the simplest pasta on the menu to test the kitchen.

A short walk north, The Halkin occupies a discreet corner of Halkin Street, between the square and Hyde Park Corner. It is quietly modern, with calm, pale rooms and a service style that is attentive without ever hovering. Both hotels suit a first evening: a drink downstairs, a short walk around the square, then upstairs without any sense of passing through a crowd.

Down on Buckingham Palace Road, across the road from the Royal Mews, stands one building that holds two very different hotels. The Rubens at the Palace is traditional in the English manner, with deep lounges and a view of the mews gates. On its upper floor, Hotel 41 is a striking black and white hideaway with a club-like lounge where the noise of the road never quite reaches.

Round the corner on Beeston Place, The Goring is not a townhouse at all, but it deserves a mention in any list of Belgravia's intimate hotels. The same family has run it for more than a century, and it keeps a family house's manners, down to the private garden that the lounge looks out on. For guests arriving by train, these three sit a few minutes' walk from the platforms at Victoria.

Ebury Street runs south-west through the quieter half of Belgravia towards Pimlico Road, and for generations it has been a street of small hotels in converted houses. B+B Belgravia and the Lime Tree Hotel are among the best known. They are simple rather than grand, but they have something the big houses cannot offer: the feeling of staying in a real street, with a real front door, a few doors down from the house where the eight-year-old Mozart wrote his first symphony.

Further south, on the edge of Pimlico, the Eccleston Square Hotel occupies a white stucco house on one of Cubitt's garden squares, with a modern interior known for its in-room technology. It is ideal for a stay of several nights: quiet, well placed for Victoria, and far enough from the main roads that the only sound at night is the plane trees in the square.

Small hotels are relaxed about visitors, provided the visit is handled with the same courtesy you would use in a friend's home. A few habits make the difference:

A townhouse hotel is a pleasure for anyone who cares how a room is put together, and some women in the edit care a great deal. Lea, petite, auburn haired and one of the Belgravia locals, lives among these streets and has a passion for interiors. She reads a room the way others read a menu, from the ceiling mouldings down to the lampshades, and will happily tell you which details work. Browse the rest of the petite portraits if you like the idea of someone who fits a small room gracefully.

For an evening in, the booking is simply one of Rosie's suite and townhouse calls, priced from £400 for an hour and £750 for two. For a stay of several nights with the same companion, the arrangement Rosie calls a season in SW1 is priced as one sum once she knows your dates. All of it starts from the booking page or a single message.