Built by Hand

The country-house hotel is undergoing a major resurgence in the UK, and one way to stand out in a crowded market – and attract a less traditional audience – is to entrust the design side to a studio that moves away from the tropes of chintz and chandeliers. That’s definitely true of new East Sussex opening Crafted at Powdermills, where Hackney’s House of Dré (founded by Andreas Christodoulou) has created a warm and contemporary take where, as the name suggests, craft is everything.

It’s in the timber furniture, made only from native species by Sebastian Cox. It’s in the quarry tiles on the floor, fired just down the road. It’s in the wonky ceramic lamps and nerikomi checkerboard room numbers made by Hastings-based Holly Dawes. And it’s also in the pursuits on offer (Dawes is also potter-in-residence at the on-site Craft Barn), and the food and drink on the menu.

If this is all starting to sound a bit worthy, there’s no need to worry. “I wanted fun to be something that ran through the spaces; they’re not excluding anyone,” says Christodoulou. Blowsy animal print cushions line the restaurant banquettes, one ceiling is decorated with a lively celestial mural and in many areas the palette is joyously unfettered.

There’s colour-drenched terracotta paint in the entrance hallway, which welcomes guests with a Georgian fireplace and roaring log-burner; and teal, taupe and green in the lounge in the members’ area (a membership scheme offering access to facilities including a co-working space, supplements the traditional hospitality offering). Christodoulou has employed the device of a line of alternating squares as a jaunty recurring motif – it runs around floor and ceiling level of guest bathrooms, struts in stripes across one ceiling and creates the border of a faux painted rug in the members’ area dining-cum-meeting-room.

Christodoulou had a challenge in that the building (which is listed, and has been a hotel since the mid-1970s) had had various extensions and alterations, not all of them flattering. “The ceiling heights differed in every space, the lighting differed in every space, there weren’t necessarily Georgian features left,” he explains. “Lots of attempts had been made to make it look grander than it was, which wasn’t that helpful.”

His interiors take every room as it comes and make the most of what’s there: low ceilings in the members’ bar have been panelled with bronze-coloured reflective panels for a mid-century atmosphere; black and white Carrara marble flooring in the restaurant, a remnant from the hotel’s previous makeover, has been partnered with elements that turn the atmosphere into something akin to an orangerie or palm court, with Christodoulou adding a long planter directly under the rooflight, ringed by banquette seating, breaking up the large space and introducing lush greenery. A diamond-patterned grid of mouldings on the ceiling, like overscaled trelliswork, complements the mood.

Guest rooms have a soothing character and this is where Crafted’s message of slowing down and enjoying the beauty of the hand-made hits home. Christodoulou says that working with Sebastian Cox on the rooms’ solid timber furniture was “a dream”, having long admired his work. Because of the relative scarcity of native timber, the rooms feature similar designs that could work across different species, including oak and spalted beech, with Christodoulou’s off-white backdrop not attempting to compete.

“This was his first commercial project like this, and it proves that it’s possible to do what he does on a larger scale,” says Christodoulou of Cox’s work (the latter also has an advisory role in the rewilding of the wider estate). Complementing the furniture are blankets by Warp Textiles, timber trays and mirrors by Kieran Letts and turned wood vases by Alistair Laburham.

In the wider hotel, the art has been curated by Despina Wooton. The majority of it is the work of local artists, and some of it’s for sale thanks to a collaboration with Lewes’ Southover Gallery, including Gary Edwards’ slip-spattered vases and Yolande Beer’s figurative ceramics.

You could easily spend a weekend at Crafted at Powdermills without leaving, by day hopping between a creative workshop, a pilates session, hot and cold plunge therapy in the lakeside sauna and adjacent ice bath (quite the sharpener on a Saturday morning in January) or a walk around the seven-acre grounds. Evenings, too, are taken care of with a warm-up drink in the adjacent pub followed by dinner where Sussex ingredients (some grown on site) are combined in finely balanced ways – from peppery radicchio and light, clean goat’s curd, to simply roasted chicken and the umami earthiness of king oyster mushrooms.

Hotelier Chris King (formerly of the short-lived but similarly ambitious Birch) hopes that the Battle site will be a blueprint for other Crafted hotels, presumably each one with its own terroir that will tell a unique story of place through its art, design and food. The medium is the message, as they say – and this hotel’s philosophy isn’t just stated in the name but embodied in every surface, object and detail.