Peter York: The way we live now

When Home House – fogeys pronounce it Hume – re-opened as a private members' club at No 20 Portman Square in 1998, it set the seal on Marylebone's new status as fashionable London's centre of the known world. The people of the old borough had been rebuilding their happiness over the decade with their astonishingly revived High Street, rejuvenated Selfridges, re-glamorised Wallace Collection, farmers' market and so on. But they still needed somewhere to go.

Home House – the building – is, according to those fogeys, the brothers Adams' finest town house. It's also a party house, an 18th-century place of parade with more grand receps than bedrooms. (Madonna occupied many of those bedrooms a few years back when she was waiting for her house round the corner to be finished.) The previous occupant, after 150 years of toffs, was the Courtauld Institute, so a whole generation of History of Art graduates spent their seminal years there. It's where Anthony Blunt ruled as Director from 1947 to 74 and taught many of the current arts establishment. It's also where he met top traitors Burgess, Maclean and Philby.

When it re-opened in 1998 as a club, the decoration was camped-up Pall Mall – buttoned sofas and Turkey carpets with every bit of the typical Adam plaster-gingerbread gilded to high heaven. But this month Home House is re-claiming its gigantic "West Wing" – extending next door into No 21 – and moving into the 21st century with a vengeance.

The furniture! I call it "furniture" but actually there's a new, fancy but genuinely better tag for this stuff: "functional sculpture". It's limited-edition sculpture you can sit on or at – like the amazing new House Bar pictured here – designed by the world's mistress of throwing spectacular shapes, Zaha Hadid. Zaha's buildings and objects always have a sinuous thing-from-outer-space quality, a Jetsons look, like giant sculpture in the sky. "I don't do nice," she famously said. Garlanded with honours, Zaha is working globally now, throwing off furniture, cutlery, shoes and even handbags as she goes.

The trick at Home House is High Contrast, classical fantastical, rendered in a particularly 21st-century way, for a series of smart parties to celebrate the end of capitalism as we know it.

Home House's extension has everything you'd expect: top-end 18th-century plasterwork, fine chimneypieces and cracked marble floors in the hall The decorative scheme plays to restraint. It's all painted in light, deliberately forgettable colours that leave the spaces to do the work. Zaha Hadid's new House Bar is something else. Dramatic organic shapes come complete with ingenious spaces for glasses and bottles of Veuve Clicquot

That arch is a Fifties fantasy, like something out of 'The Jetsons', yet utterly modern and incredibly ambitious at the same time

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