More Than Just A Bed & Breakfast!

London’s picturesque Covent Garden neighbourhood is home to the bedazzling 18-room Hotel Henrietta, designed by French designer Dorothee Meilichzon.

- Priyanka Menon

Ellen Lipton once said “Design is as much an act of spacing as an act of marketing”. Theming interiors is a tricky job, with the constant fear of coming off as ‘tacky’, but with the designers keeping in mind functionality and form along with aesthetics the spaces can do much more than just please the clients as is the case with this project.

Events and consulting company, Experimental Group’s latest offering is the very chic Hotel Henrietta, an 18-room boutique hotel that also boasts of a restaurant by the same name, by renowned chef Ollie Dabbous. Designed by Dorothee Meilichzon, founder of Chzon - a global design agency that specialises in hospitality design, the hotel is fashioned more along the lines of an intimate B&B, but interlaced with an inimitable exclusivity.

“My first inspiration for the hotel was the street itself,” Dorothee says. The hotel’s structure consists of two typically British buildings dating back to 1874 and 1877 (nos. 14 and 15 on Henrietta Street respectively) joined together in a modern endeavour. Yet, it still retains its old-world charm.

Collaborating with Romee de Goriainoff, Olivier Bon and Pierre-Charles Cros, the founding members of Experimental Group, Dorothee masterfully brings in her own signature style, which is both sophisticated as well as inspired by the region. For us, the most striking aspects of the hotel are its colour palette and experiments with various textures.

The understated colours bring out the quiet elegance that is quintessentially Dorothee Meilichzon, and the different kinds of textures work as elements of modernity allowing for the space to be viewed in a different light.