It’s bonus time at JP Goldman Rothschild and, although it hasn’t been a vintage year, you’re still getting a cool hundred thou. Well done. But this poses a problem.

How are you going to spend it? You’ve got the Riviera house, the Chelsea tractor, the gin palace, the quad bike, the chopper. The wife has her thoroughbred. The mistress has her diamonds. You’ve downed the 1948 Pétrus at Pétrus, and the 1988 Montrachet at Marco. And splashing £10,000 on jeroboams of Cristal in a Mayfair fleshpot is just not as fulfilling as it used to be.

Don’t look despondent, you poor little banker, you. Your humble correspondent has the answer: book the Cinema Suite. At £3,000 a night it will make a nice dent in your suitcase full of cash – and, as a bonus, it’s astonishingly good fun.

The Cinema Suite, by far the most novel of four signature rooms at London’s freshly refurbished InterContinental, on Hyde Park Corner, is evidence of a welcome trend in hotel rooms. As pitying women have been telling deflated men for centuries, size isn’t everything. You can only go so big before things get silly. What, after all, can you do in a 10,000 sq ft penthouse that you can’t do in the comfort of your own mock-Tudor mansion?

Champage cocktails in a London hotel

A hotel room with its own champagne and cocktail bar? Why not? You only live once, says pop princess Fiona Sims

• Britain's best cocktail bars

• From grape to glass in Corsica

• Fine wines in Languedoc

For a while, the battleground was amenities: sumptuous toiletries, raindrop showers, bath butlers, pillow menus, pillow sommeliers, pillow bellhops. Nothing to make a pinstripe playboy’s day.

Now, though, you can get half a basketball court (at the Palms, in Vegas), a whole concert piano (at the Grove, in Hertfordshire), a retractable roof (at L’Albereta, in Lombardy) or ... a cinema.

Assuming the disdainful look of a recently topped-up City trader, I checked in at the InterContinental last night. On my arm tottered a shallow floozy, in it for the money, as played by my wife. (I thought she was more convincing than I was.)

Our butler showed us around the suite ... the marble bathroom, the bouncy bed, the chaises longues, the six-seat dining table, the views of Hyde Park from every room. But I was like: “Whatever, man. Let’s see this cinema.”

And – wow. It is a real cinema. It’s not just a room with a big TV in it. There are six big, squidgy chairs that recline electronically, as they would if they were in a Hollywood mogul’s home. Each one comes preloaded with a bucket of Harrods popcorn. With the flick of a switch, the 5ft screen comes down, partially blocking the view of Hyde Park Corner six floors below. With a flick of other switches, you can choose one of 250 movies, surf for tunes on your iPod or go for an intermission (LED lights offer varying degrees of illumination, from disco blue to UFO green). At our fingertips, we had £70,000 of technology to play with.

My immediate reaction was to phone people. Six seats in the cinema. A six-person dining table. A room-service menu of pizzas, mini shepherd’s pies, champagne and strawberry milk shakes. Shame to waste it on little old us. So we invited an assortment of traders, It girls, high-class hookers and drug-dealers to join us for a party. Okay, just another married couple whom we also asked to pretend.

It’s impossible to choose one movie when you have your own Cinema Suite, because no film, not even Look Who’s Talking Too, is good enough. So we watched the first half of Spirited Away, paused for canapés, switched to Casino Royale, just for the free-running bit, paused for champagne, went all retro with The French Connection, then paused for Brooklyn beers before rounding off with Debbie Does Dallas. Except we didn’t, because we’re not bankers, we’re country mice, and it was already way past our bedtime.

In the few months the suite has been open, it has largely been unavailable, partly because one guy stayed for two months solid. Until last night, I would have pitied that guy, in an “I’m so glad I chose a badly paid career, because I get my rewards elsewhere” kind of way.

This morning, checking out of the high life and back into the one that involves a semi in Sevenoaks, a Skoda and a DVD player that doesn’t work, I realise I got it all wrong. Damn.

InterContinental London; 020 7409 3131, www.ichotelsgroup.com

Times recommends

• Britain's top 10 New Year's Day brunches
• Mozambique's lost islands
• The best things to see and do in 2010