Mount Street, W1K, and the standing arrangement it suits

The street is short, wide and red, built to a single scheme, with carved fronts heavier looking than the buildings behind them. Shops occupy the ground floors and flats fill everything above. Halfway along, an opening leads into Mount Street Gardens, a walled square of planes and benches that most of London has never found.

At the western end Carlos Place bends away towards W1K 2AL. At the eastern the street reaches Berkeley Square without ceremony. Walking the whole of it takes five minutes, and at nine in the evening you may well have it to yourself.

Five hotels stand within about nine minutes, and our companions know the way into each. They appear here for one reason, which is that guests stay in them. This house holds no arrangement with a single one of them, and never has.

W1K 2AL occupies the Carlos Place corner and is the obvious choice from this street. Four minutes north, facing Grosvenor Square, is W1K 2HP. W1J 5EB lies six minutes east on Charles Street. Seven minutes west on Park Lane stands W1K 1QA, with W1K 7TN about the same distance north west.

Bond Street lies 7 minutes north, serving Central, Jubilee and Elizabeth line trains. Green Park is 7 minutes south east, with Jubilee, Piccadilly and Victoria platforms. Walk 9 minutes south west past W1K 1QA and you reach Hyde Park Corner and the Piccadilly line.

In practice little of that gets used. Three companions live inside the district, and where one does travel the first two zones are covered, with any fare beyond them named before you agree to it.

A number of guests here keep the same evening every week or every month, with the same companion, arranged once and thereafter simply confirmed. It is the least troublesome way to use this house. Octavia holds the hour in the diary, writes to you a few days ahead, and you answer with one word.

None of it binds you, and a missed month is a missed month. The fee is the ordinary one for the hours booked, put into her hand each time she arrives. What the arrangement buys is continuity rather than a reduction: she knows the flat, the building, the restaurant, and what you are like when the week has gone badly.

People in the flats over the shops, which are far more numerous and much larger than the street fronts imply. Guests of the Carlos Place corner house who have stayed often enough to have a preferred table. Collectors and dealers whose business sits on the two streets either side. They want someone who can be introduced to a neighbour without any part of it needing thought.

Half past seven, on the first Wednesday. A guest with a flat over the street asks for three hours, dinner at the far end of the street, and a companion who reads properly and will argue about it. Octavia proposes Liana, who carries a translated Paris novel in her coat and finishes it.

Half past seven, on the first Wednesday of the month after, and the one after that. The table does not change. The argument resumes where it stopped. Three hours, £1,500, confirmed by a single line three days beforehand, and neither of them has had to organise a thing since the first time.

Angelika, Samanta and Luna live in Mayfair and can walk here. Liana and Rosa travel down from Marylebone in under ten minutes, Rosa usually with records in her bag. Bianka comes across from Knightsbridge and Karolina up from Covent Garden, each roughly fifteen minutes by car.

Grosvenor Square lies four minutes north, Berkeley Square five minutes east at the far end, and Park Lane seven minutes west. The district as a whole has its own page, and Albemarle Street, the address this house is named for, is ten minutes off. Nothing about the terms changes.