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There are two things I learned when I stayed early last December at the elegant and the very-definition-of-discreet At Sloane hotel in London, designed by the Parisian interior designer Francois-Joseph Graf. Firstly, should you ever end up in the room next to Charli XCX (I did), she is as quiet as a mouse. The singer of “Break the Rules” clearly doesn’t extend that mantra to her hotel habits, because she didn’t make as much as a peep when she came back from being a guest at the Fashion Awards, an event which really knows how to party – and then some.

Secondly, that it’s pretty darn lovely to be able to stay at a hotel (any hotel these days, let’s be honest) but particularly a gorgeous hotel – that would be At Sloane – that holds no truck with being one of those hyper-hyped, multi-starred temples to global luxury. Six stars! Seven stars! Heck, let’s go for eight – why not? Like those restaurants preening themselves because they are in some kind of menu race to have the World’s Most Expensive Cheques at the end of the night, the mega-starred places tend to feel (all opinions expressed writer’s own) kind of distasteful – and frankly uncomfortable.

So, At Sloane, then, lovely in its low-keyness, situated quietly yet proudly in an 1888 townhouse on a residential street a brief totter from Sloane Square and the King’s Road, part of the 300-year-old Cadogan Estate, and very much a collaboration between it and the Hotel Costes people, who own the place. After a building project lasting six years, there are now 30 rooms and suites arranged over five floors, with a very private yet airy restaurant atop the hotel on a newly constructed sixth floor – the walls of which are decorated with 300-plus vases – and a glorious den of a bar all the way below. (The bar, incidentally, is the only part of this hotel reminiscent of its famed Costes sister across the Channel.)

And just as the Costes could only really ever exist in Paris, so too could At Sloane only ever be in London. “I’m a very good client of hotels everywhere in the world,” says Graf, “so I love to see what designers are providing. And most of the time I’m a little disappointed, because when I am in Milan, or Paris, or Beijing, I want to be in the city. But most of the time, with hotels today, you could be anywhere in the world. My dream was to do something really English, really London.”

More specifically, if Graf’s sophisticated and historically sensitive rendering of At Sloane is anything to go by, to do something that also spoke volumes about this particular neighbourhood in London, where the hotel sits at a kind of crossroads between the area’s streets of white stuccoed residences, the former artistic communities of Chelsea, and the incredible array of 19th and very early 20th-century design to be found at the Victoria and Albert Museum just down the road in South Kensington.

Starting with a major gut interior renovation that lasted six years – Graf measured every moulding before he took it, so he could return the space to something more refined and historically accurate – he went to town creating a hotel that feels like (cliché alert, but it’s true) a home. That might be down to the fact that Graf has done only one hotel before, in France, some 30 years ago. But he’s done plenty of homes, including some in London, and what’s evident here, even with my all-too-brief stay, is that every design consideration is about the equation of aestheticism with intimacy and experience. There’s no flash to splash here.

But that’s not to say that things aren’t pretty sumptuous. This is a hotel, after all, where its 50-plus textiles were all woven in France; there are antique and reproduction 1800s WAS Benson light fittings (Graf has the copper done in India, the glass in Ukraine, and the new are so alike the old he etched his name on the former to differentiate them); and the rooms – which all vary, even if they have some decorative similarities – are furnished with pieces designed by the likes of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Josef Hoffmann.

Yet for all the internationalism, it all comes back to England for Graf. “We have some colour [in the rooms] but everything looks white, beige, and a little bit of black,” he says. “I didn’t want to have colourful rooms. I wanted to have something white, something peaceful. English décor style uses a lot of white with black doors, in ebony or mahogany. That’s the first thing you think of when you think of English decoration.”

Truth is, when it comes to Graff’s vision for At Sloane, he thought about everything. Those doors, for instance: some don’t open because he wanted absolute symmetry in the rooms. You might find that, to give that sense of home, the check-in desk is a dining table set for dinner, with the witty touch of a neon lucite chess set just in front of where you’ll surrender your credit card. And just to underscore Graf’s (and I mean this in the nicest possible way) perfectionist tendencies, he lay on the bed in every room and suite so he could see the view you’d get from the window.

Of course, inevitably, the conversation led to which is his favourite room. Unsurprisingly he loves the biggest suite, because, he says, “It has the sun all day long and I love that.” Perhaps more surprisingly, he also adores the most minute room. (Having seen it, I can vouch that it was absolutely charming.) “It might be one of the smallest hotel rooms in London, but everything is in there,” he says. “You don’t always need to have a big room, because what for? To go bowling?”

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