CozyCove Interiors

Fourteen rooms, one restaurant, a sixteen-week closure between the end of one season and the start of the next, and a hard reopening date that could not move. The program dictated the design as much as the brief did.

Designing to a fixed date

We planned the whole scheme around what could be prefabricated. Anything needing wet trades on site was minimized, and anything repeatable was drawn once and built fourteen times.

• One bedroom joinery module, built off site, delivered complete and fixed in a day per room
• Bathrooms refinished rather than rebuilt, with new fittings onto existing services
• Terrazzo floors ground and repolished in place, which took four days for the whole building
• Restaurant seating reupholstered, frames repaired, nothing replaced
• All soft furnishing ordered at week one against a twelve-week lead

Detailing for salt

The building sits four hundred yards from the water. Chrome pits, mild steel rusts through paint, and anything with a plated finish fails within two years. We specified solid brass, stainless steel and powder-coated aluminum throughout, and wrote a maintenance note for the housekeeping team covering exactly which cloth goes on which surface.

In hospitality the design has to survive the cleaning regime, not just the guests. We write the cleaning schedule as part of the specification because otherwise somebody invents one.

Rooms that take a beating

Every horizontal surface a suitcase can land on is solid timber with a repairable oil finish rather than a lacquer. Headboards are upholstered in a wool with a removable, washable cover. Bedside tables are wall-hung, which means the housekeeping team can vacuum under them in one pass.

Outcome

Reopened on the scheduled date with two rooms held back for a week. Average review scores rose by just over a point in the first season, with the bathrooms, which were the cheapest part of the work, mentioned most often.

What carried over

The bedroom joinery module has since been rebuilt for a second property under the same ownership, with only the finish changed. Drawing a repeated element properly once is the closest thing to free money a hospitality project offers, and it is worth arguing for even when the first job has only a handful of rooms.