The lady can’t talk. Then again, she doesn’t really need to. Her presence alone is enough to prompt conversation, flirtation and curiosity in all but the most unenquiring of minds. She sits against the Sloane Club’s backdrop of softly swirling damask, an abstracted tapestry of creams and rose-tinged shadows. Her dress, a deep twilight velvet, forms a sharp, architectural V at the neck, drawing the eye upward to a face composed with serene self-possession.

She radiates exquisite ambiguity: the faintest suggestion of a smile, a gaze that is direct yet unreadable, and a delicately modelled complexion that seems to hold its own internal luminescence. Her hair, arranged in immaculate, sculptural waves, places her as someone who doesn’t sit entirely outside passing vogues, though she resists being pinned to a single decade or epoch. Not only is she not much of a talker, but nobody knows the identity of the woman who now has a room named after her in Chelsea’s The Sloane Club.

“The mystery is something I would actually quite like to take to my grave,” says Neena Jivraj Stevenson, the club’s managing director, about The Lady in Black, the portrait’s sobriquet to club habitués. “I think it might ruin it if we ever did find out who she was.”

Neena, who, with her frank honesty and discreet sense of mischief has a little of the Lady in Black about her herself, has been running The Sloane Club since 2017, when Queensway, the firm owned by her family, took over the reins of the storied Chelsea establishment. A fixture of the neighbourhood since 1948, the Lower Sloane Street building that the club calls home was in drastic need of some TLC by the time she took charge.

“When we saw the business we knew it needed something quite significant. But it was never an ‘out with the old, in with the new’ attitude,” she says, talking to me in the club library on a damp Saturday morning. “We looked really carefully at Chelsea as a neighbourhood and paid attention to the fact the Sloane is the only proposition of its kind in the area. So it was so relevant. Chelsea is a village. It’s not just the people who party or the people who buy equity or the people who are creative. It’s diverse. You’ll see 18-year-olds and 80-year-olds in the same restaurants. Chelsea is quite unique in that way.”

The club’s history dates back to 1922 when Queen Victoria’s daughter, Princess Helena, opened a club in Buckingham Gate to cater for female veterans of the First World War. It wasn’t until after the Second World War that the club moved to Chelsea (the current building had been in the hands of the War Office until then) permitted men to join (in a neat reversal of the usual London members’ club story), and rechristened itself The Sloane Club.

When Neena joined, the average age of members was 75. She, and her 160-strong team, knew that major change was necessary. What followed was a two-year refurbishment of the entire building, a relaxation of the dress code, and some head-scratching about that most difficult of algorithms for members’ clubs – how to attract new recruits, without alienating the old guard.

“We had a lot of non-believers among the members,” Neena admits. “But they gave us the benefit of the doubt and stuck with us through this disruptive period of change. And they were won over when we revealed the new spaces. I think they were relieved that we hadn’t gone for a Soho House imitator look, or something that was all concrete, glass and steel.”

The new aesthetic was conceived by Russell Sage Studio, the interior design firm which also re-imagined spaces at The Groucho, Home House and the Lansdowne Club. It also created the staggering ‘Versailles in party mode’ interior of Lilibet’s restaurant in Mayfair.

There’s nothing quite so flashy in the new look The Sloane Club. But discreetly creative flair abounds; look upwards in the Demob cocktail bar and you’ll see the ceiling is covered in parachute silk; a nod to the military backstory of the club. There’s a Bamford spa and gym in the basement, a new study area and, most impressive of all, a new top-floor restaurant with a retractable roof and a pan-Asian menu. Leaning heavily towards Vietnamese, the restaurant is called Lila, after Lila Davy OBE, an original club member who served as the chief controller of the Queen Mary’s Army Auxiliary Corps during the First World War.

It’s doubtful Lila ever sampled the likes of salt and pepper organic tofu with Kampot peppers, crispy garlic, herbs and soy. But I suspect this most forward looking of women would have embraced the dish, as well as the wider menu. The desserts, in particular, are a buoyant confluence between the homespun and the well-travelled. None are executed better than the honeycomb pudding; a naturally Chelsea-sounding dish but here, enlivened with jackfruit ice cream. These are dishes that globetrot, but still possess a whisper of home.
The bedrooms upstairs have also been given a major reboot. When the refurb work began, Neena and the team discovered that many of the bathroom to bedroom walls weren’t walls at all but merely plasterboard.

All this has been corrected, with my cosy double featuring twin arched headboards, which looked like a pair of wry eyebrows. The quilted scarlet runners, soft drapery and floral prints all conspire to make a space perfect for cold mornings, hot coffee and nothing to do until after lunch (except read one of the dozens of books left on the shelves by the bed – I plumped for a Flann O’Brien paperback).

The average age of membership is now 48. Neena says the club has become something of a third child, an addition to the two who live with her and her partner in nearby Fulham. “I’d never run a private members’ club before, so I am absolutely learning as I go. I grew up in a multi-generational household in Kensington, so I’m very used to people of all ages communicating together. But I would have been much more reticent to take this project on if I hadn’t grown up here and knew the neighbourhood so well. For me, it’s home.”

As a female managing director of a London club, Neena is in a minuscule minority. It’s a topic which leads us to discuss wider changes she would like to see in the capital’s members’ scene. “I have a lot of thoughts about the club concept of when exclusivity becomes interpreted as superiority,” she says, sipping her cup of hot water (she doesn’t drink tea or coffee). “I’d like us to step back and think about that. At the end of the day, we’re part of the hospitality industry and there’s nothing worse than walking into a members’ club and immediately feeling like you’re not welcome – whether you’re a member or a member’s guest. I hate being stopped at the front desk and being told to prove my reason for being there.”

Membership numbers are up to a shade over 3,000, not including The Lady in Black painting, which was unearthed during the renovations. “There’s a slight glint in her eyes; she’s a bit Becky Sharp I think,” says Neena, as we stare at the mysterious portrait. “Russell Sage told us that the painting deserved its own room. I can imagine her being here as one of our own original members.” The Lady now holds court in a private dining room on the ground floor, bedecked in appropriately dark and mysterious shades of black.

Before Neena leaves to watch Fulham take on Sunderland with her family in nearby Craven Cottage, I enquire as to who her dream Sloane Club member would be, living or deceased. “The original members were modern women for that era – all doing active military service,” she says. “Lila Davy said it was up to women like her to show what other women were capable of. But I’d have to go for Princess Helena. I’d love to see if she felt that her spirit was alive in what we’re doing today. And also, given that she was Queen Victoria’s daughter, I’d quite like Helena to bring her Mum along!”

Membership from £2,300 pa, visit thesloaneclub.com.

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