...T'AINT WHAT YOU DO.......

" T'aint what you do..............It's the way that you do it.........
   That's what gets results............................................."

Last week we had lunch at Mr Cooper's House and Garden , Manchester , located in the Midland Hotel , food by the ' signature chef  ' Simon Rogan .

Food - excellent , really good and highly recommended ................

Value for money - excellent

Ambiance - bloody awful ; no warmth at all , no atmosphere - the lighting was dreadful.

Having a reasonable idea of who both the client and the designers are , I can guess that the design briefing went pretty much on the lines of ' This is the Midland Hotel , so you must respect the heritage and the fact that this is a grand hotel ........we need an interior to show that off '.................

Result - an uncomfortable and confused mash-up of ' fine dining ' and ' brasserie ' .

Leaving aside the question of the lighting for the moment , the problem for me is the positioning of the operation. Simon Rogan had already launched the ' French ' restaurant as the Midland Hotel's Flagship restaurant ; Mr Cooper's appeared some six months later offering a cheaper alternative , presumably to optimise the ' signature brand ' . This to me positions the customer as the ' poor relation ' to those who can afford the full dining experience of the French . Much better to offer up the operation as the best brasserie in Manchester , regardless of it's location , offering up a quality dining experience at really good value for money . The fact that it is located within the Midland should be an irrelevance .....................................

.............Just don't start me on the lighting ; I have seen better ambiance in car showrooms.. Where's the warmth , where's the fun ? Mr Cooper's House and Garden - there is a clue there , in the name , and it took me all of a couple of minutes to find these garden pendant fittings......

....................So just change the bloody chandeliers , for a start.............

...LET'S STICK TOGETHER.......

" Let's stick together...........
   Come on , come on , let's stick together "

Sometime in the last week or so Richard Branson ( in an attempt to blow smoke over the abortive Virgin Space mission ? )  came up with an offer of some £500million for the remaining members of Led Zeppelin to reform for a 35-night tour................an offer that , with add-ons , was estimated to be worth some £190 million to each of the band members.....................

To his eternal credit Robert Plant ripped up his copy of the contract in front of the astonished promoters......
........at last, someone makes a stand for artistic credibility over rank commercialism . Led Zeppelin ceased playing as a group around 1978 , but the resurrectionists still want their day........


During the same week I was wined and dined by a couple of people I worked for in the early seventies , reminiscing  over how good we all were together , the manner of my leaving long forgotten.......and I still appear on the photo heading up their web-site ..........obviously still their best line up ....................................

........and - yet again in the same week - we get out of the blue a call in the studio from my ex business partner - with whom I have not spoken for some twenty years - wanting to have a chat with us ' about putting some work our way ' , and ' wouldn't it be great to get the old team back together again.......'.

Dream on , it ain't going to happen ; there are some things that money just can't buy.............and in the words of Paul Mccartney ' You can't re-heat a souffle ...........'

.....I THINK I'M GOING BACK..................

Way back when , somewhere around twenty years ago this week , as it happens , we designed a bar  in the centre of Manchester on Mount Street - Citrus . Not too bad a scheme as it went , but we never got to grips with the basement and like most operations it eventually faded and died.................. 

 The opportunity to revisit a site or a scheme does not happen that often , but in this particular case it did. A few months ago Mark and Sunni from Velvet on Canal Street had an opportunity to purchase the lease of the Mount St site off the then current operator - another fading bar - and asked us to re-vamp the site as Velvet Central . The site is long and thin , with full height windows along one of the longer sides , so quite a different site to the Canal Street one ; we did I think however manage to capture the feel of the first one , and at least had an opportunity to re-address the basement .

.......and we managed to keep the ' fish ' element in the basement.............