Haymarket Hotel

The building is pure Nash: a handsome Regency facade off Haymarket, black railings, a lamp, the West End all around. Inside, Kit Kemp takes over. This is a hotel of bold colour, layered pattern and contemporary art, from the lobby with its striking sculpture to the Conservatory beneath its leaf-painted ceiling, the Library with its purple honesty bar, and the Townhouse Drawing Room. Nothing here is beige, and for a wedding that means a venue that needs very little dressing to look extraordinary.

And then there is the pool. Beneath the hotel lies a famous 18m swimming pool, lit and lined for private hire, and it is quite simply one of the most theatrical rooms in London. Hired for a wedding, it takes a party of up to around 220 to drink, dine and dance beside the water, a mirror-ball above, the whole thing glamorous and unlike any hotel ballroom in the city. Upstairs, the Shooting Gallery, its walls hand-painted by de Gournay, is licensed for civil ceremonies and long candlelit dinners.

Catering is by Brumus, the hotel's own bar and restaurant, generous Modern European cooking served in Brumus itself, in the Shooting Gallery, or beside the underground pool. Cocktails flow in the Library and up on the first-floor terrace, and the celebration carries late into the night in rooms that are as much a part of the day as the flowers, colourful, personal and full of Kit Kemp's joy.

And because there are 53 individually designed rooms and suites, some with their own terraces, the wedding is never just the party. Guests stay in the middle of the West End, steps from Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square and the theatres, each room dressed in bold colour and pattern, so the whole weekend, from the ceremony to breakfast the morning after, feels of a piece with the day.

For a couple who wants London at its most central, a hotel with real personality, and a wedding that dances beside a pool no other venue can offer, Haymarket Hotel is a rare find. Vows in the de Gournay Shooting Gallery, a party beside the water below, cocktails on a West End terrace, Modern European cooking by Brumus, and 53 bold, joyful rooms to fall into: glamorous and design-led, theatrical and personal, a London wedding in the heart of Theatreland.