Violetta, twenty-eight floors above Park Lane

Tall, gilded and unreadable at first glance, Violetta saves her biggest surprise for later: she is extremely funny. At 178 cm, tall and slender, she keeps her black hair long and glassy, her gaze a deep, level brown, and her desert-gold glamour suits Mayfair's grandest rooms: a liquid gold dress, a cream silk suit, fine chains at the wrist, heels that add a few more centimetres she really does not need.

Mysterious, elegant and quietly confident, she lets people come to her, and they always do. Swimming is her daily discipline, long steady lengths that leave her calm for the rest of the day. Stand-up comedy is her guilty pleasure; she knows the circuit, follows favourite comics from club to club and she lands a punchline without so much as a twitch of the mouth. Bookshops are where she goes to disappear, and she always emerges with a bag heavier than planned. In her early thirties, she speaks polished, low-voiced English with a dry wit that sneaks up on you.

Her Mayfair evening starts at Heywood Hill on Curzon Street, the small, much-loved bookshop where the shelves climb to the ceiling and the staff remember what you bought last time. Then up to Galvin at Windows, twenty-eight storeys up in the Hilton on Park Lane, where Hyde Park and the whole of west London spread out below, and she will tell you the best joke she heard this month, deadpan, as the city lights come on.

Violetta lives in Belgravia and is often booked at the Park Lane hotels and around Mayfair. She is abroad until early October; the booking page explains how Bella can reserve a dinner date for her return.