My Chelsea Hotel: An Architect From Herzog & de Meuron Redesigns Around a Rooftop Beehive

Design Travel · Chelsea

Reading Time: 7 minutes

My Chelsea Hotel’s 2002 concept was feng shui and guest personalisation, years before wellness became a hospitality industry standard. Its 2017 redesign, by an architect trained at Herzog & de Meuron and Foster + Partners, kept that instinct and rebuilt it around something much smaller and much stranger: a beehive on the roof.

---

Introduction

My Chelsea Hotel, a 54-room boutique property on Ixworth Place behind Brompton Cross in Chelsea, London, was completely reinterpreted in 2017 by the architecture and interiors studio Design Haus Liberty, led by its founder Dara Huang. The redesign, covered by Dezeen and ArchDaily in early 2018, was built around an unusually specific piece of the owner’s own life: a working beehive kept on the hotel’s roof, whose honey is served to guests. The project’s design team included Sofia Hagen and Ivana Linderova alongside Huang, and the interiors were photographed by Jack Hobhouse.

Most coverage of the project treats the beehive as a charming footnote to a botanical colour scheme. It deserves to be the whole story. This is a hotel whose entire material language, from the bar front to the bathroom tiles, was built out from one owner’s actual hobby, by an architect whose training came from two of the most rigorous large-scale practices in the world.

The brand was built on wellness before wellness was an industry word

My Chelsea was not a standalone concept. It was the second property in the myhotels group, founded in March 1999 by the architecture-trained hotelier Andy Thrasyvoulou, whose flagship, myhotel Bloomsbury, was designed by Conran & Partners around an explicitly feng shui premise, with a personalisation service called “mypreferences” that let guests specify everything from pillow type to in-room music. My Chelsea opened in 2002, extending that same wellness-and-personalisation ethos to a second London neighbourhood a full decade or more before “wellness” became the standard vocabulary of hotel marketing.

The Chelsea property had at least one earlier reinvention before Design Haus Liberty’s. The studio Project Orange redesigned it around a “modern country house” concept, deliberately mixing colours and textures to read as accumulated rather than new: a pink lobby, a white-clad bar with a pewter countertop, a conservatory with an aquarium set into the wall, pale green clapboarding and chrome portholes. Bedrooms ran to grey and purple carpeting against chalk-white and pale pink walls, cherry-red toile curtains, Lloyd Loom bed heads, dark oak desks and elm cabinets, with two signature suites pushed further still into bold reds, clashing pinks and burgundy under dramatic lighting. It is a scheme built from English eccentricity and pattern clash, closer in spirit to a country house that has been furnished by three generations than to a single coherent brief.

That scheme has since been entirely superseded, first by Huang’s 2017 redesign, which replaced pattern clash with a single organising material logic, and more recently by a further change of hands and rebrand of the property itself (see Final thoughts). Each iteration kept the address and the underlying instinct toward a personal, character-led small hotel, while changing almost everything about how that instinct was expressed materially. Read together, the two redesigns bracket a real shift in what “character” is taken to mean in London hotel design: from a country house’s accumulated clutter to a single fixed idea, however small, followed through with architectural discipline.

An architect from Herzog & de Meuron and Foster + Partners took the brief

Dara Huang trained at the University of Florida and holds a master’s degree in architecture from Harvard, and before founding her own practice she worked at Herzog & de Meuron and Foster + Partners, contributing to projects including 56 Leonard Street in New York and the Tate Modern extension in London, work at a scale and a level of technical rigour that has little obvious overlap with a 54-room boutique hotel’s bar front. She founded Design Haus Liberty in Clerkenwell in 2013, and by the time the studio took on My Chelsea, four years later, it had already built a reputation for bespoke, narrative-led interiors rather than pure architecture.

That background matters for reading the finished hotel correctly. A less rigorously trained interior decorator asked to “do something with the bees” might have reached for literal honeycomb wallpaper and left it there. Huang’s approach instead runs the beehive concept through every material decision in the building, structural, tonal and functional, the way an architect trained to think in systems rather than motifs would.

The beehive ran the whole scheme

The lobby is painted in Raven black, hung with a bespoke lighting installation of vintage filament bulbs suspended inside large glass spheres at varying heights, a piece from the studio’s own lighting line. The conservatory, a glazed, greenhouse-like common room under a pitched glass roof, runs to a muted, largely monochrome palette against which Birds of Paradise plants and other tropical greenery are used to break the space into smaller, more intimate seating zones, lit by the studio’s own Lux Pear pendants. The bar is the piece that states the concept most directly: a white stone counter clad in distressed brass, chosen specifically for its resemblance to the colour of honey, set against forest-green velvet seating and black-painted, largely recycled furniture. Huang has described the furniture decision directly: “It was interesting painting traditional chairs all black because it automatically made them contemporary.”

Upstairs, the bedrooms carry locally commissioned artwork depicting plants associated with the Chelsea Flower Show, against navy blue accent walls, with the studio’s own Dewdrop pendant lights and upholstered headboards visually unified with their side tables. The bathrooms return to the beehive directly: hexagonal concrete tiles laid in a honeycomb mesh pattern, integrated into bespoke joinery, the one place in the hotel where the honeycomb reference is stated as pattern rather than as colour or material logic.

The greenhouse room and the spa carry the same logic downward

The conservatory functions as the hotel’s actual living room rather than a spillover space, gridded glass overhead admitting daylight onto a scheme that stays deliberately monochrome so the greenery reads as the only saturated colour in the room. Splitting it into smaller zones with Birds of Paradise and other large-leaved plants, rather than treating it as one open lounge, gives a 54-room hotel several distinct places to sit rather than one large one, which matters more in a boutique property than a large-format hotel, where guests are more likely to want a corner that feels like their own. Design Haus Liberty also redesigned the hotel’s lower-level spa and bathrooms as part of the same brief, extending the honey-and-black material language below ground rather than treating the wellness spaces as a separate commission, which is consistent with a studio building one continuous argument through a building rather than a set of individually themed rooms.

What the design argument actually is

Strip away the individual rooms and the underlying decision is legible: Huang treated one owner’s specific, small-scale hobby as a genuine design system rather than a decorative theme applied on top of an otherwise generic scheme. The honey colour runs through the brass, the black runs through the furniture as a unifying device rather than a mood, and the hexagon only appears as literal pattern once, in the bathrooms, where it has earned the right to be explicit because everywhere else has already made the argument more quietly. That restraint, using the beehive to organise material and colour logic rather than to supply repeated literal imagery, is what separates this from a themed interior, and it is the kind of discipline that training at Herzog & de Meuron and Foster + Partners is specifically built to instil. A 54-room hotel is a small enough brief that this discipline could easily have gone unnoticed, mistaken for a pleasant colour scheme rather than a governed system, which is precisely why it is worth naming here.

---

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

My Chelsea Hotel’s 2017 redesign is a rare case of a boutique hotel interior taking a single owner’s private hobby seriously enough to let it govern the whole material palette, rather than reducing it to a lobby feature wall. That the architect behind it had trained on skyscrapers and a Tate Modern extension before turning her attention to a rooftop beehive is not incidental. It is the reason the honeycomb only appears once as literal pattern, and everywhere else as colour, material and restraint.

The property has since traded under new ownership and a new name, Sonder Chelsea Green, operated under the Marriott Bonvoy umbrella at the same Ixworth Place address, so the interiors described here may no longer be current at the property today. That is worth stating plainly rather than leaving a reader to discover it by trying to book a room that no longer exists under this name.