A Postcode of my Own
Inside The Sloane Club
I’ve always believed that every woman needs a postcode she can call her own; not necessarily where she lives, but where she belongs. Mine has been SW3 since roughly 1986, when I was a wide-eyed Inchbald student learning the difference between chintz and taste, and Sloane Square was simply where I went to meet friends for lunch with the Kings Road as my playground. Forty-odd years, one design career and several thousand fabric swatches later, that postcode still claims me. These days, my base within it has a name, a history, and, as of a very glamorous £26.6 million refurbishment, a rather excellent martini.
Enter The Sloane Club. Founded in 1922 by Princess Helena, Queen Victoria’s daughter, and clearly a woman who understood the value of a room of one’s own. It began life as a sanctuary for women returning from the First World War with nowhere quite fitting to land before 1976, when the club finally admitted men. A century later, it’s still doing exactly that.
You feel it the moment you step through the door. The entrance hall is deliberately, almost stubbornly intimate. No soaring atrium, no doorman built like a rugby prop, just a warm, comfortable hush that makes you exhale before you’ve even taken your coat off. It’s the sort of welcome that says: you’re not a guest here, you’re expected. And then time does something curious. It stops. Or rather, it stops mattering, which on a Tuesday morning with the Kings Road already roaring outside, is its own small miracle.
My days here almost always begin the same way: coffee in the library. Designed by Russell Sage Studio, it’s a room with a sense of humour adorned with bobbins and books, a decorative scheme that’s feminine without ever tipping into twee, quirky in the way a well-read, well-travelled great-aunt is quirky. I could sit in it for hours. Some days I do.
The Sloane Club understood, in a way so many of its Pall Mall cousins still haven’t that work doesn’t stop just because you’ve stepped into a members’ club, and neither should the club pretend otherwise. There are private meeting rooms for the conversations that shouldn’t carry beyond the door for the days when I need my head down and a full inbox cleared before lunch, which, delightfully, can be served to you exactly where you’re sitting. And nobody so much as blinks if your phone is face-up on the table. After one too many afternoons in clubs where a ringing mobile is treated as a small moral failing, the Sloane’s relaxed attitude to modern life feels less like a lapse in standards and more like a club that’s actually paying attention to how its members live.
What hasn’t changed is the courtesy. Front of house, restaurant, bar, every single member of staff carries the same unhurried, genuine warmth, the kind that can’t be trained into people. Which brings me to the question the Sloane Rangers Handbook would want answered: has the club kept its nod to the Barbour, the twin-set, the family jewels intact? The honest answer is yes, but loosely, like a favourite cardigan let out at the seams to fit a rather more interesting shape.
And after a day in town, where better. If the Library is the Sloane Club’s precursor for the day, the Demob Bar is where it exhales entirely. Dark, velvet-swathed, lit low enough that everyone looks faintly conspiratorial and it is. Without argument, the perfect backdrop for what I maintain is one of the best martinis in London. The sofas are close enough for confidences, the tables dim enough for the sort of conversation that starts as gossip and ends as something closer to therapy. The room where the day gets folded away and the evening properly begins.
The club boasts several dining rooms, each with its own personality. Lila does double duty beautifully, combining a restaurant and an event space, and one of the loveliest rooms in the building either way. Beneath that retractable glass roof, it can hold a party of 250 standing without ever feeling like it’s trying to. But it’s the rooms tucked just off it that I love best, for parties that want to stay a little more private. The Wren, a nod to the club’s naval history, seats up to 12 for the sort of dinner where secrets get told. The Lady in Black, all dark panelling and antique mirror, named for a portrait as enigmatic as the room itself, can hold 8 at the table, 20 on your feet with a glass in hand. And The Ranelagh, the grandest of the three, opens straight into Lila and seats up to 16, for when intimate needs just a little more room to breathe.
A club is only as good as the life that moves through it, and the Sloane Club’s calendar reads like a rather brilliant dinner party guest list. One week it’s a shopping fair with Alexander Tolstoy, jewels and objects laid out like a treasure hunt for people who already have everything except the thing they didn’t know they wanted. The next, it’s Rendezvous with a singles evening pitched at the 40s and 50s crowd, which is to say, grown-ups who’ve long since tired of swiping and would rather make an introduction over an actual drink. I happen to know of more than one connection made there that outlasted the ice in the G&T. In between, there are talks on wellness and health that manage to be genuinely useful rather than performatively worthy and the sort of thing you go to meaning to leave early and don’t. And once a month, the club throws its own social evening, no theme required beyond members mingling with members. It sounds simple until you remember how rare that’s become.
This, I think, is the part outsiders underestimate about a club like this. It isn’t just where you go when you already know everyone. It’s where you go when you don’t. If you are lonely in London, and London, for all its noise, is a spectacularly easy place to be lonely in, you will find people here who are willing to talk, if you’re willing to start. The thing that matters more than the martini is that it feels safe. Homely, even, in the middle of all that polish. Step off Sloane Square, through that unassuming front door, and the noise just stops.
The fitness area is the one corner of the club I know only by reputation rather than by rights. But by every account, it’s been done properly rather than as an afterthought. The gym runs on Technogym kit, there’s a studio for class-based workouts for the ones who need company to make it count, and the detail that makes me want to go and find out for myself is an infrared sauna with a shock shower for the truly committed. And then there was the spa that is a little haven of tranquillity. Two treatment rooms handle the massages and facials, using Bamford products, and I’m not exaggerating when I say a full-body massage was quite simply one of the most perfect massages I’ve ever had. Exactly the right pressure combined with hot stones that warmed the muscles through. I came out feeling two inches taller.
Upstairs, the 66 bedrooms and suites have been reimagined with a Chelsea mews-house sensibility, given a bright mid-century flavour that resonates with a spirit of care, comfort and practicality. It is difficult not to feel rejuvenated in this elegant home-from-home comfort.
And here’s the detail that seals it. Dogs are welcome across the club’s public spaces, not tucked away or tolerated but genuinely included, which for those of us who consider a dog non-negotiable company, changes the entire equation. A place that lets you bring your dog into the library for coffee isn’t just a club. It’s a home from home in the truest sense, which, when you think about it, is precisely what a group of women returning from a war a century ago were looking for too.
