21 Apr Inhabit, Viaduct

Director Richard Holland recently sat down to discuss the furniture specification of our recent Inhabit project, with Viaduct:

Holland Harvey is the east London architectural practice behind Inhabit, London’s very first boutique wellness hotel that was once a row of heritage-listed townhouses. We talk to director, co-founder and architect Richard Holland about tackling this unique restoration and how he and his team are navigating the new world of work.

Nestled in a leafy corner of historic Paddington, wellbeing is at the heart of Inhabit’s ethos, providing a calm and restorative space where guests can find some respite from the city. Behind it’s relaxed, Scandinavian-inspired interior is a restoration project like no other, involving the transformation of a row of Georgian houses into a cohesive space and wellness oasis. But the hotel as it stands today is a far more ambitious space than was initially envisioned.

“We had been working with the parent hotel group for many years, and were originally asked to review some designs that had been produced for the refurbishment of this particular site”, says Richard. “Our scope evolved pretty quickly from that point, and we were having really engaging conversations about how we could progressively shift away from the traditional hotel model, towards a more informal guest experience, with wellness at its heart.

The layout of the original hotel had been compromised by both the requirements imposed to create a traditional separation between back and front of house spaces, and the limitations of working with listed properties. By fundamentally rethinking the way in which the hotel could operate, we were able to reconfigure the building to create legible, open plan spaces for guests to enjoy that are heritage-led and sympathetic to the original layout of the Georgian townhouses they inhabit.

You can read the rest of full interview via Viaduct’s website here.