Collins Room restaurant - London, UK

The Berkeley hotel’s Collins Room (formerly Caramel Room) has emerged, at last, from a six-month spruce up by the London-based designer, Robert Angell. 

The new moniker is a particularly nice tip of the hat to the late David Collins, whose interiors works were so famously associated with the hotel. A new pavilion extension by architects Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners casts the room in glowing light, and shades of blue and sudden hits of lavender, two of Collins’s favourite colours. Over this, Angell, who was Collins’s longtime creative director, has layered whimsical botanical touches – mosaicked flower petals, de Gournay wallpaper of cherry blossoms, hydrangea motifs, and porcelain chandeliers sheathed in white petals. 

Executive chef Shaun Whatling presides over an all-day American-Continental menu of Dorset crab cakes, club sandwiches, burgers, spinach gnocchi, and smoked eel, while head pastry chef Mourad Khiat continues The Berkeley’s tradition of elaborately conceived and madly colourful pastries.