Hospitality Design - November 2019 - 26

memoir
perspectives

of commercialism, and I wanted to make the
Whitby into a little fantasy hideaway that you
wouldn't expect to find. It wouldn't be English,
it wouldn't be American, it would be filled with
interesting artworks and would have a good
feeling and character to it.
Warren Street, in the works in Tribeca, is a newbuild. It's a dream project. When you're building
a hotel you're so lucky because you have drawing
rooms, event spaces, restaurants, bars, bedrooms,
roof spaces. What more would you want?

A private event room at the
Soho Hotel in London

I love to have interiors that aren't
straightforward, capture your imagination, and
make the most jaded businessmen look around
and say, 'Oh, that's different.' I've always loved
color. I'm much more frightened of beige, white,
or gray. Although I appreciate these interiors that
are basically one color, I can't do it. Color makes
you happy, and it's one of the easiest ways to do it.
Adding color adds life.
You can put a great collection of almost anything
together, it doesn't matter. At Ham Yard, we
stuffed newspaper inside bowling shoes that we
bought on eBay. By putting them as a collection
on a massive wall surrounded by bowling
balls, they look fascinating. At the Whitby, we
took fabulous old dinner plates that are works
of art and framed them in such a way for you
to recognize that. When you get a lot of them
together, they start speaking to you. I was a bit
worried to hang 57 baskets above the bar at the
Whitby, but it worked out in the end. You have
to take a few risks. The basket is such a humble
little thing, but they have so many different uses.
And whether it was baskets on the back of ponies
bringing fish from a Scottish porch, or collecting
apples in Kent in a great big horn of plenty,
suddenly, when you start looking at all these
baskets and seeing how useful they all were, it
becomes quite interesting.

that you can't afford to use them anymore. We're
democratic in the way that we hang art. We have
well-known artists beside artists who are just
coming out of art school.

We love craft. You can have a lot of technology
and go in that direction, or you can have that
artisanal feel. That's where we have gone. When
I'm looking to find artists, it's people who love
to use beautiful pieces of wood, simple, organic
things. We like the ones who are independents,
who are going it alone. It's a great start and you
can build a rapport. They're helping you. You're
helping them. Of course, they then get so famous

One of the hallmarks of our design is oversized
headboards. With a high headboard, you can
see the fabric and the pattern. We say every
headboard tells a story, and so you can create
a story. It's the one focal point within the room
where you can have a lot of fun. Then, if we find
great artists, we can ask them to make their own
headboard, like Kumi. She's half Japanese and
her mother sends over kimonos from Japan.

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November 2019 hospitalitydesign.com

Ham Yard Hotel's neon-lit Dive Bar

She also collages, sews, and adds color to these
beautiful pieces of work. She was only making
bags before, and we said to her, 'Have you ever
thought about doing this?' We'll send her the
pattern for the headboard, and then she works her
magic. We're lucky to have found her.
There's that sort of WeWork type of atmosphere
that I love-the idea of refectory tables and people
working away, the teamwork of it all. But I don't
want to come into a hotel and feel that I'm coming
into an office. I don't mind having an area set
aside, but that's not the main feel of my hotels.
There's a lot of art and design that is technical,

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Hospitality Design - November 2019

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