C&TH GREAT BRITISH & IRISH HOTELS
Tales of bath What hoteliers put in their bathrooms is more important than you can imagine, says Lucy Cleland
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all me shallow, but while I don’t necessarily judge a hotel by the thread count of its sheets, I certainly am impressed (or disappointed) by its chosen bath and body product range in the bathroom. Show me oversized bottles of unguents with names that demonstrate that the management pay attention to this level of detail – whether they’re location-specific products or locally sourced from individual makers or just quirky new brands that I’ve never heard of – and my stay will get off to a great start and I’ll overlook other minor misdemeanours. If I see the same tired old names with their stingy sized packaging (although I’ll forgive Hermès, always), I’ll subliminally be harsher in my judgement of everything else. The same goes for their reading matter, by the way… The answer to the conundrum of what products to bless your bathrooms with is, naturally, to create your own. Step forward Chloë Luxton, wife of Charlie Luxton, who along with Dan Brod, runs a couple of properly good pubs, The Beckford Arms in Wiltshire (see page 61) and the 15thcentury Talbot Inn in Mells, Somerset (see page 70). Yes, pubs with their own home-created bathroom products. Who knew? It was a natural step for Chloë, who met Charlie when he was Soho House’s Nick Jones’
CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE: The Beckford Arms; Chloë and Charlie Luxton and their three young children; Chloë Luxton; bedroom at The Talbot Inn
right hand man. Chloë also worked for Jones for four years, as a product developer for the Cowshed brand (so named after Babington House’s old cowshed in the grounds). Chloë and Charlie decided to break out on their own in 2009, when he bought The Beckford Arms (with Jones’ full blessing – he is an investor). Their vision for Beckford was for it to be ‘an English country pub – and to bring back the “pubbyness”’. ‘We wanted to create a comfortable space, with great food that’s also a great place to hang out,’ says Chloë. Chloë’s story then becomes the typically impressive build a brand from your kitchen table-type fable. With the first of three children at her apron strings (she now has Otto, 7, Monty, 5 and Inca, 3), Chloë wanted to create a range of entirely natural bath products of her own for the pub that was inspired by the British countryside. So Bramley (named after the West London road they lived on) was born. For the pretty packaging, she drew on her love of the book Lark Rise to Candleford ‘which had beautiful images of pressed flowers’. She was determined also to make each of her six launch products to be standalone, ‘so it wasn’t a case of running the 2018/19 | COUNTRYANDTOWNHOUSE.CO.UK/GREAT-BRITISH-AND-IRISH-HOTELS | 33
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