The Meridian Room is the smallest room the hotel keeps, and the one guests ask for by name. Pale oak, white linen, and a window seat built into the wall beneath a window that faces the garden — which means the room is bright from early and stays that way until the afternoon moves on.

There is nothing surplus in it. A bed, a chair, a place to put a book down and a place to pick it up again. Rooms like this one are harder to design than large ones, and considerably easier to be happy in.

Because it is small, it is looked after closely. The books on the sill are changed with the season, and the window seat is made up each morning with a throw and whatever you left on it the night before — put back where you left it, not tidied away.

It is the room people book alone, for a few days of reading and walking, and the room couples book when they would rather share one good chair than own two. The rest of the house is never far: breakfast in the Orangery, the spa a staircase away, and the quiet bridges of the canal district five minutes on foot.