Bedroom layouts follow the innovations of other Shire Hotels, with their separate business areas created long before Hilton started to think about how guest actually needed to use their rooms. Detailing is again extremely high, with a nightlight installed at the base of the stub wall that divides the bed area from the seating area. An ironing board is part of the facilities offered in the rooms, which follow the Shire Hotels corporate philosophy first expounded at Aztec West in Bristol, of offering a five star package at four star prices and level. This is a philosophy that will become more difficult to sustain as the footprint of the building constrains the size of the room, an area that changes most as hotels move upmarket over time. The rooms succeed, as the public areas have done, in providing traditional levels of comfort within a visually strong contemporary style statement. The use of timber and leather is supplemented by effective modern lighting to provide a luxurious room space.

Ian Harkness has also led the modern trend for simplifying the food offering, working on less dishes of higher quality, with a strong bistro feel and a changing menu. The concern for food quality is reflected in the chef’s herb garden on the terrace outside the French windows to the restaurant. There is a separate dining area available for functions, with its own fireplace. The fireplace in the main restaurant has a striking zebrano wood surround, and again uses the double-sided form seen in other Shire hotels. Shire table remains, and the room, flooded with daylight in the mornings, works as effectively for breakfast as it does for dinner, a trick that many hotel dining rooms fail to pull off.

Harkness’s innovations in the food operation haven’t stopped here however, and he has created a ‘food café’ for the conference areas, where the breakout zone has permanent offerings of tea and coffee so that delegates can break at any time the flow of the conference dictates, rather than having to halt full flow discussions because that is when the hotel has organised the coffee for.

This hotel represents and incremental improvement on an already impressive product for the chain, with new thinking by designer and Client building on a relationship that has enabled to development of a philosophy coherently over many years. The designer in tune with a Client? Can’t allow that to happen, or everyone will be doing it…

If all the results were as mature, considered and good as this perhaps they should…