Hospitality Refurbishment
Private members’ clubs occupy a peculiar position in the world of heritage refurbishment. Unlike a residence, where change happens gradually and privately, or a commercial office, where function typically outweighs sentiment, a members’ club carries decades — sometimes centuries — of collective memory embedded in its walls. Members don’t simply visit these spaces; they belong to them, often across generations, and any refurbishment risks disrupting a sense of continuity that no amount of design excellence can fully replace if handled carelessly.
The City Club presented this challenge in a particularly acute form. Housed within a heritage building whose architectural character had defined the club’s identity for over a century, the brief called for a full refurbishment that would modernise the club’s facilities, improve circulation, and refresh tired finishes — all without members feeling as though their club had been replaced by something unfamiliar. This is a fundamentally different design problem to most commercial refurbishment: success wasn’t measured by how dramatically the space transformed, but by how naturally the changes seemed to belong.
Our approach began with an extended period of consultation, not just with the club’s management, but informally with long-standing members whose institutional memory shaped which elements were considered untouchable and which had genuine appetite for renewal. This process surfaced details that wouldn’t have appeared in any conventional brief — a particular staircase handrail worn smooth by decades of use that members specifically wanted retained, a colour palette in the reading room tied closely to the club’s identity, sightlines in the bar that mattered more to daily use than any design consideration.
Structurally, the refurbishment required careful navigation of the building’s heritage constraints. Original plasterwork, cornicing, and panelling throughout the principal rooms were restored using traditional techniques rather than replaced, preserving the architectural character that gave the club its sense of permanence. Where modern systems — updated electrics, discreet climate control, improved acoustic treatment — needed to be introduced, they were integrated invisibly behind existing architectural features rather than adding new visible infrastructure that would disrupt the room’s historic reading.
Circulation improvements addressed a longstanding practical frustration without altering the building’s historic layout. Rather than reconfiguring rooms, we focused on smaller interventions — improved lighting along key routes, refreshed flooring that reduced noise transfer between floors, and subtle way-finding that helped newer members navigate a building whose logic had, until then, been passed down informally rather than signposted.
Finish selections throughout balanced restoration with quiet modernisation: reupholstered furniture in fabrics matched closely to original patterns, refreshed paintwork in historically appropriate tones, and lighting upgraded for both ambiance and practical use without introducing visibly contemporary fixtures into rooms defined by their period character.
The completed refurbishment succeeded, by every account we received, in the way that mattered most to the client: members returned to a club that felt unmistakably like their own, simply working better than it had before. For a project of this kind, that quiet continuity — rather than visible transformation — was always the true measure of success, and remains the standard we bring to every heritage hospitality commission since.