- - I'm Kit Kemp, Design Director for Firmdale Hotels. Every room is like a painted canvas. It has to tell a story. We're at The Soho Hotel, just off Dean Street. Coming into the hotel is an experience in itself. As you enter the front door, you're immediately confronted by the 10-foot Botero cat. And I feel that he makes you smile. When you come into a hotel, you want to see life. And so often, it's a rather dead, antiseptic feeling where you're not a part of the city that you are arriving in. And that sense of arrival is important. You round the corner, and this leads you into the drawing room. It's a long, wide room. The colours are bright. It's a green and a pink, and it has three windows at the end of it. We've put the Breon O'Casey Aphrodite sculpture right in the centre, and it's almost as if she's greeting you in all her voluptuousness as you enter the room. Aphrodite is by the artist Breon O'Casey. He's no longer alive, but I was lucky enough to go and see him. Breon O'Casey not only did sculpture, but he was a great colorist and a very good artist. He also made jewellery and ceramics. So, his work, you'll find within the different hotels. I feel that he was neglected during his lifetime. Maybe in the future, people will start to recognise what a force he was. The sofas in front of Aphrodite are in my Bookends fabric, this time in aubergine. You always want to have the contrast of pattern and then plain. And that in itself makes the room feel slightly calmer. It's good within a large room to have spaces within spaces, so you have various sitting areas within it. On the wall, opposite the fireplace, are four paintings by the artist Peter Collins. They're framed in black. And what they do is to hold that wall together. There are three above the 15-foot table, and one just spaced further along by the window above the bow-top sofa. In the centre of the room on one side, we have a most wonderful painting by Bard. I love it because we love dogs. It's a little terrier, and pair of very squidgy legs. It's not a model's legs. It's a real person's legs. And that's why originally I loved this painting. Sitting on the centre of the table is an afternoon tea stand made of cardboard, and little cakes made out of felt with a little strawberry tart. You've even got a price on the top. This is made by Mimi, and they're just very interesting and very Mimi-ish and very us. It's ridiculous, really. Life is about compare and contrast, and especially in this hotel. It's very mixed. It's very eclectic in the streets outside. And we felt that this hotel should be like a haven of calm. And what we wanted to create within the hotel was something which was different and exciting, vibrant, but had a wonderful quality to it.