Character floors

Six Storeys on Soho is in a slender grey townhouse on Soho Square: a bar, restaurant and club. It is technically art deco, but it feels much older; it grasps back for 18th-century Soho without the typhoid epidemic and the corpses. It used to be a gay bar called the Edge, but the gay bars are closing in London, victims of a new epidemic called Grindr. Now it feels like Mary Poppins’s house after she lost hope.

I came to the Edge with my friend the artist Sebastian Horsley, who wore purple suits and a top hat, and made A.A. Gill look slovenly. He kept a gun by his bedside on Meard Street, but in the end he did not need it. He fell asleep on heroin and did not wake up, and he would love it here. He would match the furniture, and they have a lot of gin.

First, a ground-floor bar, with pretty table lamps and old novels by minor writers. I am developing a fetish for paper. I haunt libraries, and restaurants that look like libraries. I smell the books — I want to eat them. It is all ripped off from The Fable on Ludgate Hill, with less money, fewer solicitors and infinitely more charm. At The Fable the books aren’t real. They could say it is metaphor, but I think they can’t see the point of books. I don’t think they know what books are for.

Each room is a different colour, as if the decorator was drunk and wanted to remake himself each day. The first-floor parlour is grey; the second-floor drawing room is blue; the third-floor bar is a red gin house, with huge bottles of homemade gin and a disco floor, designed for people who like cocaine with their gin.