C&TH GREAT BRITISH & IRISH HOTELS
And so to bed... Hoteliers invest thousands in making bedrooms restorative sanctuaries, so why not steal some of their great ideas to emulate at home, asks Amy Bradford
Cosy on down at Lime Wood in the New Forest
A
ny hotel room you stay in inevitably invites comparisons with your own bedroom. How many of us have settled down to sleep at a boutique retreat and wished that our bedlinen at home was as crisply white, soft and possessed such a high thread count? Or that the mattress was as perfectly firm yet forgiving? Of course, the comparisons can be negative, too. Hotel lighting, for example, can be prone to irritating quirks – especially if it only functions with an electronic room key placed in a slot by the door, miles away from your bed. Such experiences, good and bad, can be instructive. Aside from loved ones’ homes, hotel stays are one of the few opportunities we have to test out a different style of decorating from our own and ponder what good design really means. Though it may feel calm and understated, a well-styled hotel bedroom can be crammed full of ideas for improving your personal space, whether that means making it look better, feel more relaxing or simply work more efficiently. Interior designers spend every working day thinking about how to make hotel bedrooms perform at their best. Kit Kemp of Firmdale Hotels, the woman behind Number Sixteen in Kensington (p114) and the Ham Yard Hotel in Piccadilly, has it down to a fine art. Her bedroom designs always feel cosseting, thanks to her flair for patterns that soothe the eye and textures that treat the senses. ‘Textiles are so important,’ she enthuses. ‘I love to put fabric on walls because it gives a luxuriously tailored but cosy feel. I also love very large headboards – they are a focal point in a bedroom.’
Bespoke headboards are often things we covet in hotels – and can be transformational in a domestic setting. Tom Bartlett of Waldo Works, who designed London hotel The Laslett, created custom-made headboards for its guest rooms ‘that hide all the messy, functional stuff, such as cables and USB plugs’ – eliminating the thorny issue of cable management with a stroke. Ben Whistler, who has a showroom at Design Centre Chelsea Harbour and has made custom furniture for Claridge’s (p107) and The Berkeley, is an expert at making upholstered headboards – as well as enhancing warmth and comfort and concealing utilities, they can muffle sound and help to keep your bedroom peaceful. Many hotels create bespoke furniture for their projects rather than buying off the peg, a trick that can be particularly beneficial in bedrooms because it allows you to tailor storage for your possessions and keep clutter to a minimum (being surrounded by too much stuff is never restful). Several of the hotel designers we spoke to listed this as a priority, including Simon Rawlings, creative director at David Collins Studio, which styled the tranquil grey-and-white bedrooms at Lime Wood in Hampshire (p79). ‘Only furniture with a purpose should be in a bedroom,’ he says. ‘For me, it should be a calm place to unwind – not making too much of a statement yet oozing comfort. It needs to be intuitive; you should be able to occupy the space without instructions.’ Such thinking is entirely in tune with current research on sleep and relaxation, which says that keeping your bedroom relatively empty will help you to unwind. Such a space needn’t feel austere, however; look
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