Stepping out of the Covent Garden Hotel on a bright spring day I felt I’d walked onto a Parisian film set – a cobbled street, a jolly man brandishing baguettes and a row of candy-coloured shop fronts. Soho has never looked this good.

It’s as if the hotel’s owner and designer Kit Kemp has cast her palette across the whole street – or perhaps it was her inspiration for the pinks, lilacs, lime greens, cherries and rich emeralds that splatter the lobby and continue throughout the hotel.

If I’m making it sound like a dog’s dinner, I’m doing Kemp a disservice – the décor is exquisite. Somehow she mixes checks, stripes and florals and cotton, velvet, leather, metal and wood and gets away with it.

Pass the challenge of finding the hotel, whose discreet signage is hidden under its striped awnings, and this colourful welcome awaits, together with help with your bags at the door and an efficient check-in from behind a floral curtain.

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BACKGROUND

• Covent Garden Hotel, Monmouth St, London, WC2

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• Thistle Hotel, Charing Cross, London WC2

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My suspicions that the lobby was brimming with media types was confirmed when my boyfriend bumped into a friend of his from BBC Films. She’d been to a screening in the hotel’s private cinema and said she was a regular at the hotel bar.

If that puts you off the bar altogether, no fear. You can escape the bustle in the drawing room upstairs, which is reserved for guests and their friends. Huge comfy sofas in cotton bunting shades and patterns are arranged around two warming gas fires.

There’s a sturdy writing desk in one corner, shelves of leather-bound tomes and grand oils looking down from the wood panelled walls. The honesty bar has everything that you’d want to accompany a morning coffee or late-night Scrabble match, from biscuits and ice cream to whisky. And if you’re too idle to get up, you can ring the brass service bell.

There’s hardly a need to book one of the hotel’s larger rooms when you’ve got this at your disposal, unless you book the Terrace Suite, with its neat terrace that catches the morning sunshine.

Of the hotel’s 58 rooms and suites it’s one of the largest, and sumptuously decorated in berries and greens with rugs from the Far East, modern prints, lilac floral armchairs, a floral mannequin and more quirky pieces.

The room also had a widescreen TV, DVD player (the hotel has an extensive library), hairdryer, easy-to-use and quiet air conditioning and a minibar chock full of goodies like mini bottles of Champagne, organic fruit juices and fair-trade chocolate.

The curtains had blinds behind them for a full blackout and there was no noise from the street disturbing our night, although we were on the fourth floor.

The bathroom was large with rainsoak shower, Miller Harris toiletries, plus bathrobes and slippers. My only gripes were that the internet wasn’t free (30 pence per minute up to £20 a day) and the absence of tea and coffee making facilities in the room (the bill for two cups of tea was over £8 with service – steep even if they did come with homemade biscuits).

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