Hospitality Architects in Essex.

A hospitality building is a working commercial asset. Every square metre either generates revenue or supports the operation that does. Hotel, pub and restaurant projects are approached with that discipline in mind. Front-of-house needs to feel considered and welcoming; back-of-house needs to perform reliably at service. Neither can be resolved in isolation.

We are used to reading a floor plan alongside operational drivers, and to working within an operator's brand standards where they exist, rather than against them.

The Lion Inn Restaurant and Hotel at Boreham has been a long-running hospitality relationship, evolving through successive phases from a village inn into a substantial destination business. Lincoln's Inn Fields Hotel in central London represented a very different kind of work — a listed terrace carefully converted into a boutique hotel, with heritage, hospitality and interior design all in play.

A considerable part of hospitality work in Essex involves listed pubs and older hotel buildings. Bringing an operator's commercial brief together with Listed Building Consent obligations is a specialism in itself. The Practice is well practised at finding routes that combine a considered operator brief with the design restraint the fabric demands.

Hospitality work begins with the operational brief: covers, guest numbers, back-of-house flow, service routes and how the business will trade during construction. That brief shapes the architecture from the outset rather than being fitted around it later.

From there we follow the RIBA Plan of Work, with phasing planned carefully where a venue needs to keep trading. Licensing, Building Regulations, fire strategy, acoustics and accessibility are all coordinated as the design develops, and on a listed pub or hotel the consent route is agreed before detailed design begins.

We have worked with national pub and hotel groups as well as independent owners, and we understand the reporting, brand standards and procurement processes a larger operator brings. Our interiors team works alongside the architectural side of the Practice, so FF&E, joinery and lighting are resolved as part of the same design rather than handed to a separate consultant.

Several of our hospitality relationships have run over many years and multiple phases, which is the pattern we prefer. Knowing how a business trades makes the next phase quicker to brief and easier to get right.