Projects · Hotels & hospitality
Chewton Glen, New Forest
The fitted joinery of The Kitchen — the five-star hotel’s cookery school and restaurant — and the reception desk of the house itself.
Chewton Glen is one of England’s best-known country-house hotels — a five-star hotel and spa on the edge of the New Forest, a few minutes from the Hampshire coast.
In 2017 the hotel opened The Kitchen, a cookery school and informal restaurant created with the chef James Martin, in its own building in the grounds. MSO Joinery made the fitted joinery that furnishes the room: the runs of leather banquette booths with their oak cappings, the bar with its fluted copper front on a lit plinth, the oak wine racks over the back-bar, the oak-framed screens that divide the long room, and the serveries with their banks of oak pigeon-hole drawers.
Everything was set out and made at our bench in Poole and installed on site to the opening programme — finished like furniture, and built to take the daily trade of a restaurant and a school of cooks.
Two years later the hotel came back to the workshop for a separate commission: the main reception desk of the house itself, where guests check in — it has its own page. We have also made the oak ladder stairs to the loft bedrooms of the treehouse suites.
The bar
A fluted copper front wraps the bar carcass and stands on a lit plinth, so the metal glows along its length in the evening. Behind it the back-bar runs the room under copper pendants, with oak wine racks built into the joinery above the bottles.
The Kitchen · bar & back-bar
The booths
Runs of ribbed leather banquettes, capped in solid oak and set on painted plinths, with copper-topped tables between. They are the seating of a busy restaurant and cookery school, so every joint was built to be sat on, leaned on and wiped down a thousand times.
The Kitchen · banquette seating
The serveries
The serveries carry banks of oak pigeon-hole drawers with finger pulls, set into painted carcasses beside the fridge housings. Storage the staff use all day, and one of the textures that gives the room its warmth.
The Kitchen · oak drawer banks
The screens
Oak-framed screens break the long room into rooms without closing it off, and carry the timber of the trusses down to eye level. The wine racks and copper of the bar read through them.
The Kitchen · oak screens
Details
The Kitchen
A family job
Father and son, in a finished booth.
Matt O’Grady with his father Sean on the day the photographs were taken, in the spring of 2017. Sean is the joiner Matt learned the trade from; three generations of O’Gradys have made their living at the bench, and this is the kind of room that shows why.
Matt and Sean O’Grady · The Kitchen at Chewton Glen, 2017
Related work
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