The London room where the bed wins and the second guest loses

The bed arrives first. Not in the sense of a grand reveal, but in the sense that it occupies the room the way a piano occupies a small flat: everything else has been arranged around the fact of it. It is enormous, it is very good, and it takes most of the floor with it. What remains has been engineered with real precision, which is a compliment as long as you have come alone.

The room

Two people unpacking simultaneously is a negotiation rather than a task. One of you sits on the bed while the other opens a case; the choreography sorts itself out within about ten minutes, and it never stops being choreography. This is not a design failure so much as a design decision, and the hotel has never pretended otherwise. Single occupancy is the brief here. Couples travelling light will be fine. Couples travelling with anything resembling luggage will find that the room has opinions.

Book the view. This matters more than it usually does, because in a room of this footprint the window is doing structural work. Without it, you have a clever small room: well thought out, everything within reach, nothing wasted. With it, you have a clever small room with London in the window, which is a materially different proposition at eleven at night with the lights on and the glass doing what glass does at that hour. The upgrade is the difference between admiring the engineering and enjoying the stay.

The bed is the best thing in the room, which is fortunate, because it is also most of the room.

Downstairs

The lobby is the surprise, and it is a genuine one. Most hotels in this bracket give you a corridor with sofas in it and call it a lounge. This is a proper space, with enough of it to sit in different ways depending on what you are doing, and for most of the day it operates as a coworking floor. Laptops on every surface. Quietly busy rather than performatively so. There is a particular kind of hum that a room full of people working alone makes, and it turns out to be more conducive than silence.

The practical effect is that working outside your room becomes the better option rather than the compromise. Given the square footage upstairs, this is not incidental: the hotel has effectively moved your desk to the ground floor and made it a nicer desk than the one you would have had. For a business trip, the two floors work as a single argument. Sleep extremely well in a small room; do everything else somewhere considerably larger.

The rooftop

The strongest thing here. The views do most of the work, as views at this height near Tower Bridge tend to, but the bar is genuinely good rather than merely elevated, which is not the norm for rooftops attached to hotels. The drinks are priced with the confidence of somewhere that knows you are not going to leave, descend, and find a cheaper one. That confidence is not misplaced. It is still worth an evening, and probably the evening you would otherwise have spent looking for somewhere better.

What to know

• Pay for the view room. In this footprint the window is not a luxury, it is a component.

• Two people will manage. Two people with two large cases will manage differently.

• The lobby is a working floor for most of the day, and a good one: plan to use it rather than the room.

• Rooftop drinks are priced as a captive market. Budget accordingly rather than resentfully.

• Location is not the compromise here. It is one of the reasons the rate is what it is.

The verdict

The reservation is the sticking point. Everything the hotel does, it does with intent: the bed, the lobby, the rooftop, the position. None of that is in question. But for the size of the room it is asking more than it should, and the gap between the rate and the square footage is wide enough that you notice it on the second morning, when the novelty of the engineering has worn off and you are trying to find somewhere to put a coat.

This is not a complaint about the philosophy. Small rooms in expensive cities are a reasonable trade, and citizenM has been more honest about that trade than most. The issue is that the trade has drifted: you are now paying a full London rate for a room that was originally priced as the clever alternative to one. The second guest is a related but separate matter, and not a harsh one. The room was designed for one person. It is what it is.

So: a different room next time, and specifically the one with the window, booked knowingly and used mostly for sleeping. Everything else here happens on the ground floor or the roof, and both are better than the room, which is either the hotel's cleverest idea or its most expensive one.