Auburn changes with the room. Under a lobby chandelier it reads warm brown, beside a window at dusk it turns copper, and under the brass lamps of a late bar it can look close to crimson. Three companions on the rota carry it: Lea in long auburn waves, Luna in the darkest red on the board, and Patricia in auburn brown. Each has a favourite kind of light, both to be seen in and to see London by.
It is the shortest hair list here, three names in all, so plan a little further ahead than you would for a brunette or a blonde. The desk would rather hold a good evening for Thursday than squeeze a rushed one into tonight.
Lea notices rooms before people: the wallpaper along a corridor, which armchair in a suite is worth sitting in. At The Goring she will want to walk the garden before dinner, in any month. She lives in Belgravia, throws lopsided pots at a ceramics studio on Saturday mornings, and loves serious theatre in small rooms such as the Donmar Warehouse. Petite at 161 cm, hazel eyed, sweet natured, and happiest when a plan improves halfway through.
Luna heads south of the river. First the Bridge Theatre, by Tower Bridge, for something new, then up to Gong, fifty two storeys above the street in the Shangri-La, for a long wine list and a longer view. Her camera looks for reflections, never faces: black glass, rain on a pavement, polished brass. Curvy at 171 cm, bold and quick to laugh, she is based in Mayfair and at ease in hotels around London Bridge. She works Monday to Thursday only, so ask early in the week.
Patricia's light is the shaded lamp. Her ideal evening begins among the creaking floors of Heywood Hill on Curzon Street, where she pulls from the shelf a novel you would have walked straight past, and moves on to the Library Bar at The Lanesborough, leather and low bulbs, for an old fashioned. Give her a room with a good window and she may sketch the view in watercolour, three or four strokes, and leave it propped on the desk. Slim, 172 cm, gentle and attentive, she likes a day or two to plan.
Theatre and a late glass need the four hour dinner date, £900, and that is how Lea and Luna are usually booked. A bookshop, a drink and dinner fit the same four hours with Patricia. Shorter visits are simplest to arrange midweek, and the rates page shows what ninety minutes or two hours will cost.
Hair on this list is recorded as each woman wears it now and checked against her current photographs. If one of the three changes colour, she moves list within the week. By figure the three sit on different boards: Lea with the petite companions, Luna among the curvaceous, and Patricia on both the slim and slender and the statuesque lists.
Choose from this list by name, or write two lines about the evening, and the desk offers whoever is on shift.
