How the British Museum's eight million-strong artefacts inspired the interiors in the new hotel that shares a wall with it
London's latest hotel opening has both a global outlook and a strong sense of place — inspired by the British Musseum — finds Grace McCloud.
There are some hotels designed for splendid seclusion with vast televisions for all-day movie marathons, accompanied by room service on repeat. If that kind of luxury is what you’re looking for, well… I hate to break it to you, but the Zetter group’s newest creation — its first in more than a decade — is not for you.
‘We’ve been quite brave,’ says James Thurstan Waterworth, founder of interior design studio Thurstan, which has overseen the redevelopment of six Georgian townhouses into one hotel. ‘We’ve taken out almost all the TVs.’
James wandered the British Museum's galleries for research and credits its eight million piece collection with inspiring the hotel's communal spaces and 58 bedrooms and suites.
The 'genuinely eclectic and globally inspired' spaces feature African and Oceanic pieces, Asian decorative art and more.
Such a move is, he admits, ‘a bit of a gamble. I’ve designed everything around the hope that people want to experience their surroundings while they’re here.’ There is, of course, much to see and do in WC1, from gaze at the chocolate-box townhouses of its Georgian squares to visiting its galleries and institutions, the zenith of which is surely the British Museum — mere strides from the Zetter. (In fact, the hotel’s garden wall borders it.)
The museum, home to around eight million objects, has been a lodestar in James’s design process for the hotel. It has been a joy, he explains, to wander its galleries for research — and it’s why the Zetter’s communal spaces and 58 bedrooms and suites are as genuinely eclectic and globally inspired as they are, filled with African and Oceanic pieces, Asian decorative art and more. Cleverly peppered throughout, paintings from the post-war period pay homage to another local inspiration, the late Howard Hodgkin’s studio.
Anyone familiar with Thurstan will know there is a heavy accent on antiques in the studio’s work. Contriving a conversation between historical design and contemporary contexts is, James believes, the most reliable route to genuine atmospheric texture — layering at its most successful. He thinks he has bought more than 1,000 antiques for this project, 2,000 if you count the textiles, sourced all over, from the UK’s rural antiques fairs (Shepton Mallet and Kempton are favourites) to Parma’s Mercanteinfiera by way of auction houses and choice dealers (James cites Will Green among his favourites).
James had already worked with Zetter’s owner (they bought the group in 2021), but this time round was entrusted with overseeing a hotel’s creative direction more broadly, from branding to the website to the entire guest journey. Without the trust and total freedom he has been afforded, James says, ‘all that would have been impossible, not least from a purchasing point of view.’ And it’s easy to see why this is true.
James has been involved with Zetter Bloomsbury from the hard-hat days, almost five years ago, when builders were busy knocking what were two hotels, spread across the six buildings, into one. Even before the rooms themselves had taken shape, he was busy stocking his antiques arsenal, conscious that the auctioneer’s gavel waits for no man. ‘When you see something good, you have to get it,’ he says, ‘even if you’re not quite sure what you’ll do with it.’ Recently, with Thurstan’s 325 square metre storage unit bursting at the seams, the Zetter project was afforded its own depository — and it is only now, as James and his team work towards final installation ahead of opening, that he is working out exactly what will go where.
It’s a process that reminds him of his early days working at Soho House two decades ago, a company for which he would eventually serve as European design director. Working on hotels, they would install instinctively and in situ, a process he found totally ‘invigorating — and a great reminder that overthinking leads to sterility. You have to be able to react to a space, to see how things work, or don’t.’ The idea that you could buy a rug four years in advance and never play with where it might live feels wrong-headed to James, removing spontaneity — and therefore spirit — from the process.
James is known for his sourcing of antiques for projects.
Naturally, with experimentation such as this comes the possibility of disappointment — one of the inherent challenges of sourcing antiques. James is all too familiar with the realisation upon receiving textiles bought at auction that their condition is not quite as described, just as he is with so-called scale fails, recalling the excitement of winning an 18th-century oak chest of drawers that was to become a ‘perfect’ bedside table, only to discover, too late, that it was six inches tall, likely made by an apprentice to showcase their skills. While miniature furniture is destined only for a doll’s house, at least slices of moth-eaten rugs can be salvaged, with a bit of imagination, for cushions and the like.
Such ingenuity is, in fact, a key quality for an antique hunter — and James’s own has served him well in this project. When it came to the bar at Zetter, for instance, James was adamant he wanted something vintage, but after trawling and trawling, he had to admit defeat. Nothing beautiful was big enough. Then he had an idea: why not recreate something? Searching his stores, he lit upon an 18th-century chinoiserie cabinet which he redesigned on a grand scale before taking it to decorative crafts specialists Faberby Studio, who over the course of 18 months painstakingly replicated the original’s craquelured lacquer. Another invention with which James is particularly pleased are the lampshades he fashioned from a 19th-century mosquito net that had been lying around the Thurstan offices ‘with no purpose in mind whatsoever’.
While there is a multiculturalism to Thurstan’s design language, James has also been careful to source lots of English — specifically Georgian — pieces for this project, underscoring the tonal shift that the opening of Zetter Bloomsbury heralds. Where the group’s older hotels in Clerkenwell and Marylebone have a more Victorian design vocabulary (rich colours, heavy drapery, sumptuous upholstery), James has begun to shape a ‘loose Georgian townhouse concept’ for the brand. The emphasis, he explains, is on ‘loose’: he feels strongly that slavishness is to be avoided at all costs, not least as the 18th-century collectors he has held in his mind while dreaming up these schemes ‘would have had pieces from across all eras’.
Crucial to the concept’s success is, James believes, ‘a sense of fun’, but there’s a need for flexibility too; as the interior designer says: ‘Antiques do break’. Happily, his client understands that ‘one or two might fall by wayside’ over time. ‘I don’t mean to be blasé,’ James says simply, ‘just realistic. Things will change.’ Of course much at Zetter Bloomsbury has been designed with practicality in mind, but James’s biggest priority — and challenge — has been to make these considerations feel invisible. ‘We have treated this project exactly as we would someone’s house,’ James says. ‘That’s what makes a room feel truly comfortable.’
Of course there have been friction points — fabrics have to be fire-treated, and for every well-worn beauty there’s a workhorse of a sofa that can handle the weight and wear of ‘ten people a day, 365 days a year’ — but you wouldn’t know, such is the emphasis on individuality that runs through every space. ‘I don’t want people to feel that they’re in just another hotel room,’ James says when asked what he hopes people will feel when they visit. ‘I want the things that surround them to spark a conversation. I want people to know where they are, rooted in place and time.’ It’s a tall order for a hotel, but when each room is a jewel box all its own, it feels possible. Inside each one — part sanctuary, part salon, pure Thurstan — I’m willing to bet you won’t miss those televisions.
Click here to read Will Hosie's full review of The Zetter Bloomsbury.
