The restaurateurs behind Le Caprice and The Ivy open their first hotel, The Beaumont, this week.

The story of The Beaumont begins in 1926. Back then, the newest entry in the current arms race of London’s hotels was a parking garage, the sort of spot one might lash up the Duesenberg before shopping at Selfridges. Meanwhile, the hotel’s namesake, James Beaumont, was a popular general manager at New York’s Carlyle hotel. “Jimmy” had friends on both sides of the Atlantic, a bit like Rick Blaine of Casablanca fame. Tired of the hypocrisy of Prohibition and yearning for the sophistication he had experienced in London while being stationed there at the end of the Great War, he fled New York and decided to open a hotel in the former garage.

Or at least that’s how Mr Jeremy King explains the origin of The Beaumont, a 73-room bespoke hotel that opens on 9 October. The thing is there never was a real Jimmy Beaumont. He is a figment of Mr King’s imagination. The Beaumont was an Avis car rental just a few years back, but what stands there now is the result of Mr King’s expensive education staying in the best hotels around the world and obsessing over getting the look, the service and the charm right in his own.

Opening The Beaumont is not without its risks. Mr King and his partner of 33 years Mr Chris Corbin have enjoyed a long reign as London’s heavyweight champs of restaurateurs. They have an uncanny knack for creating A-list canteens where the glitterati feel at home – Le Caprice in the 1980s, The Ivy in the 1990s, The Wolseley in the noughties, and more recently The Delaunay, Brasserie Zédel, Colbert and Fischers. But they have never opened a hotel. Like Mr Keith McNally (Balthazar) of New York or the Costes brothers in Paris, Corbin & King has an intuitive feel of what makes diners comfortable — be it leather banquettes, a vintage menu or a wait staff devoid of theatrical ambition. Messrs Corbin and King do not take the risks of the hotel business lightly, but they derive confidence from the idea that a hotel is an amplification of a restaurant, not a wholly different undertaking. And whenever they and their team were in doubt about details such as the typeface on a menu or what sort of mosaic tile to use in the guest bathrooms, they would merely ask, “What would Jimmy do?”

So what hath Mr Beaumont wrought?

Stepping into The Beaumont lobby is stepping back in time to an era when a zeppelin was an airship, not the soundtrack for air guitar. The lobby floors are black and white tile; the walls are panelled in cherry wood. Paintings of society belles and officers in uniform line the hallways. Reception is off to the right, but straight ahead is Jimmy’s Bar and the Colony Grill Room. Both are meant to evoke the New York that Mr Beaumont escaped. (The Colony was a café society restaurant in New York.) Having control of the restaurants was preferable for Mr King as he has stayed in enough hotels where there was a tonal disconnect between a belle époque hotel and an Asian fusion restaurant. Those who felt that Mr Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant at Claridge’s was a crossruff know what he means.

In keeping with the old New York vibe, the walls in Jimmy’s Bar are covered with black and white photos of personalities from the 1920s to the 1940s. The hotel also has a guests-only, secondary bar called The Cub Room because Mr King likes the idea that if you’re a guest you shouldn’t have to fight for a seat at a popular watering hole at the end of the day. This pocket bar takes its name from the VIP area of the Stork Club. Nicknamed the "snub room", this quieter area of the Stork was where Mr Sherman Billingsley liked to play gin-rummy in peace. (Film buffs will recognise it from All About Eve.)

Just past Jimmy’s Bar sits the Colony Grill Room, a 100-seat dining room with walls lined with Art-Deco murals of scenes from important American sporting venues – downhill skiing from Sun Valley, Idaho; greyhound racing from Scottsdale, Arizona; wooden boat racing from Lake Tahoe and an old-school menu featuring chicken marengo and porterhouse steaks. The grill is lined with red leather banquettes including an additional horseshoe of them in the middle. Messrs King and Corbin discovered over the years that diners prefer booths and started designing their restaurants with an eye towards minimising the number of freestanding tables.

The 23 hotel suites and 50 guest rooms reflect a combination of Mr Beaumont’s taste and Mr King’s peccadillos. Desks and dressers are in rosewood with shagreen-covered drawers. The chairs are upholstered in velvet mohair. Ceilings feature recessed, cove lighting. The bathrooms are glass, tile and chrome with Carrera marble tubs. A typical single comes with a wood pocket door that divides the sleeping area from the dressing area because Mr King is an early riser (his wife more of a sleeper-in), so he likes being able to create a private zone where he can bathe and dress without disturbing her.

One simple thing that sets Mr King off when he is a guest at a luxury hotel is finding a cheap breakfast order card attached to the door or placed on his pillow. To his mind, this is the hotelier’s version of ticking boxes rather than thinking outside the box. In his experience, hospitality has devolved into a series of questions fired at a guest at the time of check-in – wake-up time, newspaper of choice — rather than something that happens with an air of serendipity. At The Beaumont, he wants his team to interact in a genuine way with guests – memorising names, drink orders and ringing up to let guests know that if they were so inclined today there was mango rather than orange juice. The basement too features facilities and services meant to pamper guests only – a gym, hair salon and spa complete with a sauna, hammam, massage and a cold plunge. One of the inspirations for the vintage look is the bath department at The Royal Automobile Club on Pall Mall.

The Beaumont sits on one of the quietest streets in central London. It overlooks Brown Hart Gardens, an elevated piazza, and is surrounded by Georgian townhouses. Few would notice this white pile if not for a large modern sculpture jutting out of the façade.  This conglomeration of rectangles is sculptor Mr Antony Gormley’s “Room”. The name is fitting because the inside of the sculpture is the master bedroom of one of the hotel’s suites. Lined in fumed oak with mitred joints, the experience of sleeping inside the sculpture feels both womb-like and barn-like (if the barn were a masterpiece of woodworking).

“Room” is a novel touch for a hotel whose guiding spirit is a fictional character, for these days everyone needs a point of difference. Jimmy Beaumont’s hotel opens in a competitive season. The Mondrian has newly opened in the old Sea Containers building on The South Bank, Mr André Balazs’ Chiltern Street remains the hostel of choice for the Gulfstream set, and The Rosewood, a renovated Edwardian pile in High Holborn, celebrates its first anniversary this year. So the next few months will determine whether Corbin & King’s new venture makes the short list of the world’s best hotels and whether Mr King gets the opportunity to write a sequel.