If you've driven on a French autoroute recently, you'll be familiar with the words "Restez Zen". They appear on overhead motorway signs and advise motorists to take it easy, relax, stay cool. The same message could also be flashed above the entrance of the Hempel Hotel, an elegant facade of stucco-fronted Georgian townhouses in London's Bayswater.

Step past a forest of Phalaenopsis orchids in the small entrance foyer and you enter a Reception area that Kubrick might have designed for a futuristic film set, an empty swimming-pool length of windowless Portland stone and down lit Italian plaster bounded at each end by sunken seating and long, low fires where the flames flicker blue over beds of crushed oyster shell. In this cool, enclosed space, the walls are windowless and bare of ornament, the only furnishings a pair of Indian ox carts that serve as tables in the seating area and two slat-wood deck-chairs by Australian designer Marc Newson that you don't know whether to sit on or look at.

The facilities

If the Hempel was just somewhere to stay it would be a memorable and satisfying experience. But there's more here than stylish accommodation and staff in signature black suits. In the basement below the Hempel's reception hall, reached down a perspex staircase fixed to a block of stone, you'll find I-Thai, the Hempel's dining room serving some of the most exciting fusion food in the capital, a captivating take on Italian, Thai and Japanese classics.

The restaurant was simply, and seriously, sensational at this luxury hotel. It was a melt-in-the mouth experience. Each course, served by an efficient, knowledgeable staff, was a mortar round of intense, unforgettable flavours, each dish so precisely judged, so perfectly presented and so sculpturally exquisite it was as much a treat for the eye as the tongue. The rooms

This same style statement continues in the Hempel's guestrooms. Each of its 35 rooms, six suites and five private apartments - room numbers light-projected onto the corridor floors - are lean, clean and spare. Beds are set on platforms or suspended from ceilings, bathtubs are hewn from blocks of black granite or pale limestone, and the bare wood floorboards are wide, limed and lacquered.

But make no mistake; there's nothing minimalist or monastic about the Hempel's in-room creature comforts. The Frette bed linen is silkily crisp and cool, the sofas plumply inviting and the mini-bars a marvel of pampering sophistication - a choice of French, Japanese or Italian lagers, the Hempel's own label champagne, still and sparkling water from Norway, and a canister of oxygen (presumably for the rarefied atmosphere). There are also scented Diptyque candles, compact Kodak flash cameras and a range of 'Anatomicals' - everything from breath fresheners to a "Bender Mender" hangover cure.