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Dining by DesignDouglas Blyde talks to Hawksmoor’s Huw Gott about the latest addition to the protein-fuelled empire at Guildhall, in the City of London.
Who is your interior designer?
Macaulay Sinclair, who also worked with us on our second venture at Seven Dials.
What was the brief?
To create a restaurant that looked and felt like it had been there for a long time. The frontage of the building we are in was built in 1923 and is listed. The most recent developer kept the frontage up but knocked everything behind it down, so when we arrived it looked a bit like a car-park: concrete floor/ceiling and breezeblock walls. We wanted the interior to fit in with the frontage. And we wanted it to be a really comfortable place to be, so worn-in rather than shiny and new.
What was the space used for previously, and how did it look?
The building was used as offices with part of our demise being used as a nightclub (a pretty seedy one according to a few of our customers who remember it!)
How have reclaimed materials been applied to such a convincing effect, and what were their origins?
Wall panelling in the restaurant and our private steak room is made from the doors of specimen cabinets from the Natural History Museum. When they built their state-of-the-art Darwin Centre a few years ago they did away with some of their old storage facilities. So, dotted around the room, there are keyholes and labels which show what was kept in the different cabinets. The glazed screen between the bar and restaurant was made from doors from a ‘20s University of the Arts building, next to Bond Street tube station which was knocked down as part of the Crossrail development. The teak parquet floor came from the same building. The ceiling lights in the bar are old lights from a reclamation yard – we got someone to make variations on the pattern of these lights for the wall lights and the ceiling lights in the restaurant. The large circular window over the stairs was made by putting two semi-circular fanlights from a City bank together. The tiles in the restaurant were made from Victorian glazed bricks – sliced into a tile shape. Finally, the (big) door to the private dining room was from the British Library. We wanted to get together a group of reclaimed materials that all worked well together rather than an eclectic reclaimed interior. They’re all from a similar era to give the illusion that they had all been put in at the same time. I don’t think we could have got anywhere near the feel we wanted to create using new materials.
Clearly it is built to last, so how do you foresee the scheme aging?
Guildhall should feel like a City institution that’s been serving food and drink to City gents for decades. As part of our research for the interior, we visited lots of old-school members’ clubs and City buildings. There’s no exposed brickwork and (amongst other things) there’s more wood panelling than at our other sites. Naturally, I hope that the comfortable worn-in feel will get better and better with age...
Hawksmoor
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