Harrison have been shortlisted for Hotel Design – UK Award in The International Hotel and Property Awards 2023.

Design firm Harrison has completed an interior design project at the Hilton Birmingham Metropole, NEC, transforming the hotel’s four key spaces into modern environments fit for today’s guests and consumers. The hotel’s prime location near Birmingham Airport, Birmingham International Rail Station, Resorts World Birmingham and the National Exhibition Centre (NEC) meant it was essential to create welcoming spaces that would encourage guests to spend time in the hotel rather than local restaurants and bars.

Hilton Hotels & Resorts approached Harrison with the brief to strip the four spaces back to their foundations and rebuild them with a brand proposition that would improve the hotel’s connection to Birmingham. This would include bespoke storytelling, optimising functionality to generate revenue, and creating environments that people would genuinely want to spend time in.

To tackle the brief, the Harrison team, led by Design Director Dean Concannon and Senior Designer Nathan Stevenson, identified the hotel’s guest portfolios and developed key brand pillars and cornerstones. The team delved deep into the history of Birmingham to create a connected and genuine storyline between the hotel and the city itself.

Harrison rewrote the narrative and created four individual concepts with a connecting thread throughout, each encompassing a different aspect of the city’s personality. Brightsmith on the Water is a bar-restaurant with views looking out onto Pendigo Lake. The name reflects both Birmingham’s industrial past and the glamour this industry paved the way for. Gild Bar & Lounge is an all-day quick-service café-bar that explores Birmingham’s ‘City of Contrasts’ narrative, with The Gild championing the historical ‘City of a Thousand Trades’ and revealing how a new wave of designers and makers are responsible for the Midlands’ creative resurgence.

The Arbor is a breakfast and daytime buffet space that represents Birmingham’s reputation as one of the UK’s greenest metropolitan areas, with earthy tones and manmade textures contrasting with lush organic shapes of nature to bring a sense of the outside, in. Finally, the Executive Lounge, designed for Hilton members, draws subtle inspiration from the West Midlands’ 400-year glass-making heritage that reached its pinnacle in the early 20th Century, with hand finished speckled glass light features, decorative glass screens complemented with furniture in jewel tone velvets.

The motivation for Harrison was to move away from the cliché of Birmingham, known for cars and concrete, and reveal some of the many hidden stories from the exciting and emerging city that boasts one of Europe’s youngest populaces. Harrison approached this project from the ground up. The team wanted to reimagine the space as a lakeside hotel, colliding rich history, industry, and luxury all in one place.

Location: Birmingham, UK

Interior Designer: Nathan Stevenson, Senior Design, Harrison

Hotel Group: Hilton Hotel & Resorts

Photography: Jonathan Banks

Harrison

---

design et al only work with the world’s leading design companies working in the Hospitality industry.

If you think you have what it takes to compete in The International Hotel & Property Awards, submit your application by clicking here.

How to Apply  /  The Categories