Group Hotel of the Year
WHO would have guessed that Hotel du Vin & Bistro would have become a chain within five years of its Winchester debut? Certainly its founders, Robin Hutson and Gerard Basset, claim they didn't. Yet they opened their third townhouse hotel in Bristol in 1999 to great acclaim, and it is this property that receives the Group Hotel of the Year Catey.
The 40-bedroom hotel is slightly different from its older siblings in Winchester, Hampshire, and Tunbridge Wells, Kent. It is in a converted sugar refinery, giving Hutson, who designed it, scope to create loft-style bedrooms with open-plan bathrooms, experimenting at the same time with rough hessian fabrics, steel and brick.
Hutson calls the Bristol property a mark three, his way of moving the product on while maintaining core values, a fact observed and praised by the judges.
Still developing
"They have developed in line with the best thinking in the industry and are still developing," said Simon Johnson. Ken McCulloch added: "The founders are still there, and although the product has evolved they have stuck to their original values. They understand their target market well and have crafted a proposition that works on all levels."
Equally impressive was the fact that Hutson and Basset had succeeded in capturing the Bristol dining market, one that is traditionally difficult to conquer because of the wide number of options available.
Among other accolades, the 100-seat bistro took the Restaurant Association Wine Restaurant of the Year for 2000. Condé Nast Traveller magazine lists the property in its Hot List as "One of the 21 coolest hotels of the world," and both the AA and the RAC give it a four-star rating.
Where many hotels fall down is in maintaining the consistency of their product. Not so for Hotel du Vin, according to judge Albert Hampson, who said that AA inspectors had made several visits to the Bristol property and were satisfied with the consistency and quality of the product on each occasion. "Hotel du Vin is an outstanding innovation - they just always seem to come up trumps," he said.
Since the opening of the Bristol Hotel du Vin, Hutson and Basset have opened another hotel in Birmingham. And this is just the beginning of the story. The intention is to have 10 hotels up and running by 2007, and the judges of the Independent Hotel of the Year Catey were in no doubt that all future properties would be as successful as the first four.
"Hotel du Vin demonstrates the wow factor. It shows the innovation that everyone in the industry should aspire to," summarised Stephen Carter. n
