Through the impressive entrance lobby of London’s Café Royal have passed over the years such figures as Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, James Whistler, Winston Churchill, Cary Grant, Elizabeth Taylor, Muhammed Ali, David Bowie, Mick Jagger and all the members of the Beatles. So in crossing that gleaming white marble floor, as I was privileged to do two weeks ago, one cannot but hear the ghostly footfall of the famous proceeding ahead.

My destination, at least on arrival, was not as theirs was to the many-mirrored splendours of the Grill Room. A left turn in front of its doors brought me to a desk at which I signed in for an overnight stay. Since December of last year the Café Royal has been a super-luxury hotel, its Regent Street premises having been expanded, at enormous cost to Israel-based hotelier Giorgi Akirov, through the incorporation of a bank on one side and on the other, in an iconic position on Piccadilly Circus itself, the County Fire Office. This imposing structure, completed in 1928, was the work of architect Sir Reginald Blomfield, who designed the principal buildings at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Its sixth-floor Club Room, with its iconic dome, is now one of six Historic Suites, giving views of Westminster, Big Ben and, of course, the circus itself.

The Dome Suite was occupied throughout my visit, which was generously arranged through press representatives of the hotel and the Royal Academy of Arts as a prelude to a tour of the splendid Australia exhibition, reviewed today in Weekend by Theresa Thompson. But I was shown over the other five, including the Tudor Suite, complete with period fireplace and lavish panelling, and the very grandest, the Empire, whose vast spaces (212 square metres!) contain decoration and fittings of improbable opulence. This gilded splendour is in telling contrast with the majority of the rooms, where an uncluttered elegance is achieved through functional design and use of the best traditional materials, including a great deal of marble. Our room, or rather rooms, were in the style of those shown above. The bedroom walls suggest the Portland stone blocks in the sweeping curve of Regent Street. The curtains swish quietly across under electrical propulsion triggered by a control beside the bed, where the lights require no touch to illuminate, merely a hand hovering close to the switch.

The glass doors of the bathroom inspired what I called my ‘Butterfly moment’ (see above), owing to their similarity to those used for the Pinkerton pad in Welsh National Opera’s long-lived production of Puccini’s tearjerker.

I was actually snapped in the corridor, where there are many more of these panels, making our way downstairs for dinner. Readers might not forgive my omitting to mention what we ate in the Ten Room restaurant. I began with dressed Cornish crab, continued with a huge Dover sole meunière and finished with cheeses; Rosemarie had lobster and fresh water prawns, fillet of halibut and bitter Amedei chocolate royale. After this superb meal, served with the good manners and charm we observed from every member of staff here, we finished the evening in the Grill Room. We had glasses of viognier, though we should have tried absinthe in tribute to Oscar Wilde, who once overdosed on the stuff after dinner and mistook a waiter stacking chairs for a girl plucking tulips. (Don’t ask.) Wilde’s connections with the place are too well known to require rehearsing: they include meals with rent boys (today’s variety still loiter in streets nearby), with lover Lord Alfred Douglas, with his infuriated father the Marquess of Queensberry, and with Frank Harris and George Bernard Shaw whose sage advice about what he should do following Queensberry’s persecution — flee the country — was sadly not taken.

I shall instead conclude with mention of a lesser known literary figure indelibly linked with the place, the impossibly camp Ronald Firbank. As Jocelyn Brooke wrote in a study published in 1951: “He became a well-known figure, and with his tinted cheeks, his carmined nails and his shrill, feminine tones, was apt to startle more conventional habituées. ‘My dear,’ he would suddenly exclaim without warning, ‘I saw a crossing sweeper in Sloane Street today with the eyes of a startled faun.’”

n The delights of the Café Royal Hotel can be enjoyed for as little as £399 per person per night on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, complete with a bottle of champagne and breakfast. Suites are far pricier, beginning at £4,000 a night. For information, telephone 020 7406 3322 (hotelcaferoyal.com).