Holland Harvey Architects’ development of Inhabit Queen’s Gardens puts the Bayswater hotel on the map as a luxury destination centred around wellness and sustainability.

Key features

Completed this year as a sister hotel to an existing location on Southwick Street, Inhabit Queen’s Gardens offers a haven in West London for those seeking an increasingly coveted mix of high-end hospitality and environmentally conscious design. Formed from a crescent of Grade II-listed, mid-19th-century Victorian townhouses, the hotel preserves the intimate residential feel of the network of buildings. Holland Harveys’ work, at the same time, repurposes the spaces to provide a competitive level of modern comfort and range of wellbeing facilities. Maria Gutierrez, senior designer at Holland Harvey, says that ‘celebrating and enhancing the existing heritage building and keeping sustainability at the heart of the project inspired subtle but deliberate architectural moves.’

Inhabit founder Nadira Lalji reiterates the importance of the hotel network’s primary aim: ‘Our focus on wellbeing at Inhabit extends to the wellbeing of our community and environment. Throughout the build of Inhabit Queen's Gardens, we sought to experiment with socially and environmentally responsible design and construction.’ With the added assistance of collaborations with Caitlin Henderson Design, Culture A and There’s Light – paired with bespoke furniture by Goldfinger – this central ethos feels tangible throughout the hotel’s guest rooms, communal spaces, meditation and exercise area and treatment rooms. 

Frame’s take 

Holland Harvey sets a high standard in their adaptive use of space and materials in the development of the hotel, demonstrating a commitment to making the design and construction process as sustainable as possible. Working together with Inhabit, the architecture firm enlisted multiple net-positive brands and suppliers into the project, with a specific focus on using sustainable and upcycled materials wherever possible. Almost all the waste produced from the project’s production stages was either recycled or reused in different forms throughout the finished space, modelling best practice in the world of conscious design.