A certain British interior designer has been decorating hotels all over Paris so it feels only fitting that a French interior has just designed the chicest and buzziest new hotel in London. At Sloane is a new hotel in Chelsea from Jean-Louis Costes, the man behind Hotel Costes, and Cadogan Estates who tapped legendary interior designer François-Joseph Graf to decorate the arts and craft style interiors. It’s a bit shocking that At Sloane is only the second hotel that Graf has designed. It was more than 30 years ago that he designed the interiors for La Mirande in Avignon, France. “The inside of a building should smell and breathe the same air as the outside. Otherwise, the interiors just become ‘decor.’ When you step inside you have to have to feel that the house is alive. The idea here was to give the impression that everything already existed”, Graf told WWD.

ReardonSmith Architects worked on renovating the previous apartment building into a hotel with 30 bedrooms and suites; a lobby on the ground floor; a bar with a separate entrance downstairs, and a restaurant on the new sixth floor, which has its own cupola and offers views over Sloane Square and beyond. “We built everything — the floors, the ceilings, the stained glass. I put stained glass everywhere — in the bar downstairs, the lobby, the restaurant and the rooms because it’s so cozy, so English. It means you don’t have to use those chiffon curtains, which are terrible,” Graf also said.

Graf used a palette of colors and textures to achieve the right mood in each room. There are 21 carpet designs, 19 curtain designs, and 50 custom made fabrics, from companies including Loro Piana. While the guest rooms that look white are actually filled with 25 colors, multiple shades of beige “and a little pale red. Red is very cheerful,” says Graf, adding the carpets in some of those rooms are made from six different shades of beige and off-white.

“You create a dream for three or four nights, you surprise people with the design, and you give them pleasure. I would love to do more hotels,” says Graf, whose ambition is to redo a “grand hotel in London” with intimate, sensual interiors similar to those at At Sloane .

Graf says he likes the idea of transforming the historic, luxury architecture of grand hotels and designing something that appeals to a new-generation clientele. His ambition is always to create an atmosphere that speaks to good taste, rather than loads of money, a space that “gives people the idea they’ve been invited.”

I can’t wait to check it out on my next trip to London.