Hospitality Refurbishment

Every private members’ club eventually confronts the same tension: the expectations of its members evolve, even when the building housing them does not. The City Club’s dining and function spaces had, by the time of our engagement, fallen behind what members increasingly expected from a comparable venue — while the club’s leadership remained determined that whatever changed should still feel unmistakably like the same institution members had joined decades earlier.

This second phase of the refurbishment focused specifically on the club’s principal dining room and adjoining function spaces, both of which had seen little meaningful investment in years despite constituting the heart of the club’s social life. Members increasingly hosted private dinners, society meetings, and family celebrations in these rooms, yet the spaces themselves had not kept pace with the flexibility and comfort those occasions demanded.

The brief called for a careful recalibration rather than a wholesale redesign. Dining capacity needed to flex more easily between intimate dinners and larger gatherings, acoustic conditions needed improvement to support conversation across a full room, and service logistics required modernising to keep pace with contemporary catering standards — all without disturbing the architectural character that made these rooms special occasions in themselves.

Reconfigurable furniture and flooring formed the practical backbone of the solution. Rather than fixed seating arrangements that forced every event into the same footprint, we specified furniture systems that could be reset quickly between configurations, supported by underfloor power and data points concealed beneath traditional flooring finishes — allowing modern event technology without visible cabling disrupting the room’s period appearance.

Acoustic treatment addressed a longstanding member complaint about noise carrying awkwardly across the dining room during busy service. Rather than introducing visible acoustic panelling that would have altered the room’s character, we worked with specialist acoustic engineers to integrate sound-dampening materials within existing wall panelling and beneath new upholstery — solving the practical problem invisibly.

Lighting design played perhaps the most transformative role, precisely because it required the least visible intervention. New layered lighting circuits allowed the room to shift convincingly between bright daytime function use and the warmer, more intimate atmosphere members expected for evening dining — all controlled from a single, discreetly located panel rather than the mismatched switching the room had accumulated over previous decades.

Service areas behind the scenes received equal attention, even though members would never see them directly. Improved kitchen-to-floor circulation, updated service stations, and modernised catering infrastructure allowed staff to deliver a noticeably higher standard of service without any of that operational improvement being visible in the room itself.

The result, delivered without disrupting the club’s ongoing calendar of events, gave members a dining and function space that quietly did more — hosting a wider range of occasions with greater comfort — while looking, to anyone walking through the door, essentially unchanged. For a club defined as much by continuity as by comfort, that combination was precisely the brief.