Henley hotel looks to shed ‘dull’ image with colourful £4.5m facelift

A HOTEL in Henley has been refurbished at a cost of £4.5 million.

The work at Hotel du Vin, in New Street, the site of the former Brakspear brewery, took two years to complete.

Under the guidance of interior designer Anita Rosato, all 43 bedrooms plus public areas, including the hotel’s bistro, has received a facelift.

A new lounge space has also been created with all influenced by the Arts and Crafts style and French farmhouse charm with mid-century accents.

Ms Rosato, from Surrey, has more than 30 years of interior design experience and has worked in refurbishment for about 20 years.

She described the site as having an “astonishing location”, with the River Thames on its doorstep, and Henley as an “historic pageant town” and wanted to combine these in her work.

“The hotel site is full of history,” she said. “It was quite a challenging building to work with. Whenever I work on an existing building, I look at all four corners of it to try and absorb some of the commonality.

“The first phase of work was the bedrooms. With the riverside location, a big element that influenced my work was what happens over the royal regatta season. It is a pageantry affair where there’s a dress code and they have the striped blazers which are well-known. It has its own character.

“The hotel needed elevating because the clients in Henley are full of character and I wanted to represent that in the interiors.

“I came up with three schemes for the rooms and I wanted them to be as vibrant as possible while creating a melting pot of residential feel. With hotels in general, there is the element of home from home but I wanted a degree of theatricality. I wanted it to be fun for people.”

Ms Rosato said that the “serious evidence” of the old brewery made it difficult for her to plan how to “lighten the rooms up”.

She said: “I wanted a contemporary feel. I think Henley is so full of history that the younger population are forgotten, so I was trying to integrate that. I was thinking, this is what Henley needs.

“It needs to be a place where youthful contemporaries are happy to be there. The rooms are much more memorable to be in. They’re photographic, they’re Instagrammable. That’s part of our lives now.

“I’m very proud of the restaurant in particular. I try my best in most of my projects for my work to be timeless, and while I am aware of trends, I am proud of the fact that a lot of my interiors, you can look at them 10 years later and they still stand. I’m very proud of the ground floor area in general but I am very proud of it all.”

Ms Rosato’s mother was Danish, her father Italian and her maternal grandfather, Karl Erik-Jepsen, was an architect.

She said: “I didn’t grow up thinking that I’m going to be an interior designer. I just knew that I wanted to do something creative.

“It’s so funny how you realise you’re connecting with your roots because here I am, following in my grandfather’s footsteps.”

Ms Rosato had previously helped with the refurbishment of The Dorchester, a luxury five-star hotel in London’s Mayfair, during the late Eighties and early Nineties.

She said: “I felt the hotel was crying out for something, it needed brightening up. I’m very passionate about what I do.

“Refurbishments are a lot more difficult than starting out with a blank canvas because you have to evaluate the treasures that are in the building or evaluate what is holding on to and you have to bring that on to the canvas of your design and integrate it so that it seamlessly integrates with everything that is new.”

Natasha Humphreys, the sales manager at Hotel du Vin in Henley, said: “Now that we’re fully reopen, we are very much looking to reengage and connect with everyone to bring customers back. Every single area has had a face-lift, rearranged and restructured. It has been so exciting for us.

“We’re really enjoying bringing back residents that we haven’t seen in a while as well as welcoming guests for functions.

“Everyone seems really impressed by the standard of our redesign, we’ve had some lovely comments about all the new bedrooms. They’ve been done so beautifully and Anita has really kept true to the hotel being the former brewery site.”

Ms Humphreys added that the refurbishment has given the hotel a “really nice atmosphere”.

Lana Sergina, who has worked as the breakfast supervisor at the hotel for about six years, said: “I think the refurbishment is very nice.

“Everyone is happy with how it looks, the staff, the guests. It used to look a little dull, even a little flat but now it’s so much brighter and there’s so much more decoration.”