Evening Standard, April 2008

Martin Miller's life is one I think I'd quite like. He seems to have dedicated it to the indulgence not only of his passions but also of his whims. The publisher of Britains first illustrated price guide to antiques since 1969, Miller makes his own award-winning gin and holds salons and soirees in his own Notting Hill academy. He has even written a cheerfully rackety, and I imagine, non-bestselling thriller a clef, The Wookey Hole Affair, about his acquisition of the Victorian hotel Glencot Manor in the Mendip Hills. Nowhere is Miller's eccentric and clubbable personality more vividly displayed, though, than in his eponymous Residence, three storey guest house-cum-24-hour house party he opened in W2 in 1997.

We arrived after a pleasant twilight stroll through Holland Park and Westbourne Grove, just as the light was failing. Behind an anonymous door, chandeliers in which one bulb in 10 functioned dimly illuminated what looked like the treasure trove of several lifetimes. Aladdin couldn't touch Martin Miller. Every inch of the place is covered with pot stands and figurines and Victorian chemist’s jars and curios. Oil paintings jostle for space with Vargas pin-ups, antediluvian posters and sconces. And that's just the stairwell. The big and shaggy Miller emerges from a junk-stuffed grotto that passes for the reception area. "We're hanging pictures" he declares. Where, I wonder.

Next to reception is the Drawing Room, the heart and hub of the residence. Here are massive Art Deco figurines above a huge, warmly functioning, carved oak fireplace, a Punch and Judy booth concealing a television, a massive oak table where breakfast is served (for as long as you like, all day if necessary) amid a jumble of cruets and pottery and fruit bowls and cake stands, all of them showing signs of fond use.

Miller clearly believes that just because something is marked or broken, it doesn't stop being useful, beautiful, or both. A candleholder shaped like a monkey in a dress is missing an arm. An ornate carved dining chair missing two of its legs is perched atop a heavy Victorian cabinet. Below this, there is a complimentary bar, offering Hardy's red wine, Millers Gin (naturally) and the most arcane and unwise cocktail ingredients (Kahlua, anyone?). Leather-bound volumes would tumble from their shelves if there were any space for them to fall.

In keeping with Miller's love of romanticism and the 18th and 19th centuries, all eight rooms are named after poets. Ours, Coleridge, has maroon walls, heavy red drapes, and doors adorned with verses from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Only two of the five chairs look safe to sit on and genuine oil portraits cluster up agins reproduction Renaissance sketches in gilded Victorian frames.

The quirky mixing of eras extends to the widescreen TV, which only gets four terrestrial channels, although DVD's can be borrowed, and the bathroom is basic but endowed with a power shower. There's internet access, but mod cons are not the point of Miller’s Residence: it's best to sink into its timeslipped atmosphere. Of the other rooms, Shelley is cool and blue, Browning and Tennyson a cheery primrose yellow and dominated by four poster beds, and Wordsworth, surprisingly, has more of a pinkish boudoir/bordello atmosphere than Byron.

Fortified by gin, and resisting the urge to sink into a sprung sofa downstairs with a volume of poetry, we ventured out into Westbourne Grove. Miller's own kitchen doesn't rise above breakfast croissants and coffee but it sits above Brazilian grill Rodizo Rico, Vineet Bhatia's upmarket curry-house Urban Turban is over the road, and there are countless excellent restaurants nearby. Unfortunately, we settled for the ultra-close Hereford Road, the modern English restaurant set up by Tony Pemberton, formerly of St John Bread and Wine.

Here we are told that we might have to wait for a table but not that we would have to do so with our coats on, without drinks, while watching obstreperous Nottin Hill toffs who'd arrived after us seated before us. Or that we'd also have to wait half an hour for our starters and another 60 minutes for our mains. This would have been more annoying if we didn’t have Miller's Drawing Room, and it's drinks table, to return to. The fire was roaring, and we bid good evening to the French couple partially digested by the sofas.

It's that sort of place. Indeed, we might have fallen into conversation and had our own late night soiree were it not for the lone American cramped hunched into the corner, talking loudly into his mobile, and implying by his body language that we were all intruding on his conversation. Surely Miller should insist that only telegrams are permissible, at least after 6pm.

Even with the window open on a cool night we slept well, which could be attributed to roadworks closing off Westbourne Grove but which I prefer to believe was thanks to the hotel transporting us back to a quieter, gentler age.

Breakfast is nominally from 8am but as my wife had an early meeting, they kindly brought it out earlier for us, and the friendly farewell made me glad that I'd resisted the urge to half-inch some of Miller’s more delightful curios. I've stayed in smarter and better equipped hotels but few are so pleasingly, unusually well endowed with the host's enviable personality.

Reviewed by Nick Curtis