A new spin on the inn: Heston Blumenthal's redesigned Hind's Head

Increasingly, the redecoration of former pubs offers an opportunity to evoke a long-lost style of decoration.

Hind's Head
A local's welcome: Fabled Studio's nostalgic new design for the interior of the Hind's Head in Bray

Few things offer greater insight into the future of interior design than swanky London clubs and hotels and none more effectively than those that graced the first incarnation of Annabel’s, where Mark Birley and Nina Campbell created a new standard in buttoned, deep-pile luxury.

Almost overnight, velvet banquettes, paintings with picture lights and strategically placed occasional tables became a requirement of any project with ambitions of luxury.

Other projects have subsequently achieved a similarly lasting impact, not least Ian Schrager’s St Martin’s Lane hotel, which launched a hugely popular brand of Minimalism, and then, in the following decades, Kit Kemp and Soho House both created similarly influential looks.

More recently, designers have been required to tackle a style of architecture that, in many respects, is far more challenging: the transformation of the traditional country boozer into somewhere that weekending West Londoners would feel at home. It was in the Cotswolds (where else?) that the art was first perfected, most famously The Wild Rabbit in Kingham, which demonstrated the transformative possibilities of exposed stone, tongue-and-groove panelling and a restrained palette of pale blues and neutrals.

hind's head

A bedroom at The Wild Rabbit in Kingham
(Image credit: Martin Morrell)

Now, there are signs that the look is taking an even more dramatic turn. Heston Blumenthal’s recently revamped Hind’s Head in Bray, a 15th-century coaching inn, offers a vision of a long-lost style of Home Counties pub in which you might expect to find Terry-Thomas sinking a couple of stiff G&Ts before a burn in his DB3. The interiors celebrate furnishing—old canework chairs, ottomans with fathomlessly deep bullion fringes and taxidermy in bell jars—that bossy style dictators were imploring us to jettison a few years ago. The effect is to evoke a look that’s redolent of country pubs before the arrival of that ubiquitous church-pew-and-chalkboard combo.

You only need to look at the success of tastemakers such as Ben Pentreath—the designer who has revived a host of comforting staples of quintessential Englishness from Staffordshire pottery to oak dressers—to see that, after decades of appropriating the aesthetic traditions of other parts of the world (Scandinavia, France, Japan, New England), we’re at last beginning to celebrate our own.


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Giles Kime
Giles Kime is Country Life's Executive and Interiors Editor, an expert in interior design with decades of experience since starting his career at The World of Interiors magazine. Giles joined Country Life in 2016, introducing new weekly interiors features, bridging the gap between our coverage of architecture and gardening. He previously launched a design section in The Telegraph and spent over a decade at Homes & Gardens magazine (launched by Country Life's founder Edward Hudson in 1919). A regular host of events at London Craft Week, Focus, Decorex and the V&A, he has interviewed leading design figures, including Kit Kemp, Tricia Guild, Mary Fox Linton, Chester Jones, Barbara Barry and Lord Snowdon. He has written a number of books on interior design, property and wine, the most recent of which is on the legendary interior designer Nina Campbell who last year celebrated her fiftieth year in business. This Autumn sees the publication of his book on the work of the interior designer, Emma Sims-Hilditch. He has also written widely on wine and at 26, was the youngest ever editor of Decanter Magazine. Having spent ten years restoring an Arts & Crafts house on the banks of the Itchen, he and his wife, Kate, are breathing life into a 16th-century cottage near Alresford that has remained untouched for almost half a century.