....A BOTTLE OF RED......

A bottle of red , a bottle of white

It all depends on your appetite ................................

Ok - just two or three quick sketches for the re-vamp of the basement restaurant at Velvet , the hotel on Canal Street in Manchester that has figured before on these postings - this space was originally fitted out some 15 years or so ago, and is now looking tired compared to the bar and hotel rooms on the upper floors . So , time to revist it and bring it up to date. The work is scheduled for a couple of weeks in January and no doubt the finished scheme will feature on these pages sometime after that.....

.......and in the meantime , this building on Canal street is one of the four buildings that I wll be looking at as part of my MA course.......................more of that next week.



REMEMBER - WHAT THE DORMOUSE SAID...

I think what is nice about running a small design practise is that it allows you the freedom to be creative, to work for those one-off clients who allow you to indulge yourself, who don't want the corporate branded look but something with a degree more individuality, more flair. One of the projects I have most enjoyed recently was working on the hotel for Velvet, on Canal Street in Manchester - 19 bedrooms, all different, for a client who wanted that little extra . If you haven't seen it on the RCA Interiors website, have a look at the hotel gallery at http://www.velvetmanchester.com/

The couple of sketches shown here, firstly as a line drawing and then fully coloured , are for another one-off scheme set in the Gay Village in Manchester - this time a tea-room. The brief from the client was simply to be over the top , be as camp as we like, with possibly a background reference to the Mad-Hatters Tea Party in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland.....' Eat me.......Drink me '...........a nice brief and a quick sketch, good fun.....whether it will be built like this I don't know, but we can hope.

The tea-room is to be set on the ground floor of Richmond House on Bloom Street , of particular interest to me as I know the building well and have identified it as ' The House for a Book-Lover ' , to be developed as an idealised scheme on my upcoming M.A. course. A literary tea room fits in rather neatly with a book-lover's house......

...and remember what the dormouse said....' Feed your head, Feed your head '....