Another Place, The Lake – Creating the Feeling of ‘Relaxed Living’
Director Zoe Hooton looks back on HPA’s project with Another Place: The Lake as this stunning new hotel experience on the shores of Ullswater prepares to open in August 2017.
It’s always a bittersweet time nearing the completion of a construction project with a Client. While it’s the end of a long journey together, you also are privileged to be a part of the beginning of their next adventure. Your frequent phone calls and meetings cease – having sometimes spanned years – but you have helped to deliver the overall dream.
The brief for Another Place: The Lake was simple – create a place that is very much ‘of the Lakes’. This wasn’t just about creating a hotel, it was about developing the concept of relaxed living.
DREAMS AND ADVENTURES
When we first sat down with the team behind Another Place, we not only needed to learn about their business, but also understand their aspirations for others’ dreams and adventures. Another Place has a unique vision about what a hotel should be, and our role was to help them translate that vision into reality.
As well as just dealing with the usual practical considerations of a hotel design project, every detail was driven by how Another Place want their guests to feel. It wasn’t just practical things like what temperature the swimming would be and how many towels guests would want that needed to be considered.
We thought how people could be in the pool, but feel part of the landscape. And how children could get out of the pool safely, but still get that sense of adventure. We looked at every possible way that someone getting married might like their wedding tables set out and how we could achieve that for them. We pondered how the serving of coffee in the morning could be an experience, rather than an everyday occurrence. We asked how a guest would relax, and where, and how they would walk.
AN EXCEPTIONAL LANDSCAPE
We considered where we could position the bath tub (and how high it needed to be) to get THAT view of Ullswater and its exceptional surroundings. I even learned how a good hotelier anticipates how their guests will open the curtains in the morning.
If your Client cares this much about delivering great detail to its guests, then it’s part of your job to work together to design that. You work hard together to deliver this vision within all the usual constraints of time, budget, and often in this case the famed Cumbrian Lakeland weather.
This has been a thoroughly enjoyable project in which to be involved and I can’t wait to see how the next part of the adventure unfolds. Good luck to all the Another Place team!
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