Miniview: Fairmont Cheshire – The Mere

Mirror-like Japanese lacquer is a bold thing to bring to a Cheshire country estate, and Bergman Design House has brought it alongside handcrafted zellige, coloured cement tiles, beaten metals, expressive stone and figured timber veneers. It is a long list for a hotel with a golf course attached, and a studio with less nerve would have trimmed it. Materiality is the signature at Fairmont Cheshire – The Mere, and Bergman Design Studio has committed to it.

Image credit: Vigo Jansons

The setting explains the extensive list of materials. The resort occupies 157 acres outside Knutsford, with a lake, woodland and a parkland golf course laid out in the 1930s, and its history runs back to the Domesday Book. The brief for Bergman Design House, founded by Marie Soliman and Albin Berglund, was a full restoration and expansion, and doing both at once is where many projects lose their nerve. Rooms went from 81 to 116, an increase of more than 40 per cent, and 23 of them are suites, roughly one key in five. A new spa, a revised food and drink offer and refreshed public spaces came with them. The project took several years, with Manchester architects Leach Rhodes Walker working alongside the studio for developer Select Group and Accor’s luxury Design & Technical Services team.

The design studio spends its days on hospitality, residential and yacht interiors, all disciplines that live or die on foundation and finish. Soliman says the lake came first. “Every material decision was tested against that lake view,” she explains. “When a space has this much natural character already, restraint is the harder skill – knowing what to leave alone matters as much as what you add.” Confident talk from a studio with this much lacquer to its name, though the logic holds. Lacquer gives a room a surface that behaves a little like water, and timber and stone take their cue from the woodland and the ground.

A word on the tile. Zellige, the glazed Moroccan clay tile, is cut and finished by hand, so no two pieces sit quite level or catch the light in quite the same way. Cement tile, pressed with its pigment running right through, is the louder relation. Between them they give a hotel pattern and colour with a human wobble in it, which is difficult to specify and rarely cheap. Beaten metals and figured veneers play the same game, each one showing the hand or the grain it came from.

The public spaces take their cue from mid-century hospitality: sculptural forms, layered lighting and richly textured materials. It is a well-chosen reference for a house this old, glamorous without turning into period pastiche. Sculptural forms also do useful work, giving a room presence without leaning on ornament, which suits a hotel with a lake outside to do the decorating. The bars are built around Fairmont’s Classics Perfected cocktail programme, and proceed on the sensible premise that a guest who orders a perfected classic will want somewhere good to sit while it arrives.

Image credit: Vigo Jansons

Gordon Ramsay at The Mere is the headline commission and the one with most to prove: a chef of that name arrives with expectations of the room as well as the plate. Bergman Design House describes the brief as dramatic yet intimate, which is a lot to ask of one dining room, and conceived the restaurant as an architectural setting in its own right. The Orangery and The Club Lounge complete the dining.

In the bedrooms the volume drops. Guestrooms and suites keep to gentle palettes, bespoke furniture, fine linens and warm, layered lighting, the same thread that runs through the public rooms. On an estate where the light goes early for half the year, that attention to lighting is well placed. It is Fairmont’s approachable luxury written up as a design brief, and a sensible one for guests arriving off the golf course or out of the spa.

The spa is the other big idea. The Fairmont Spa covers 1,715square metres and was developed with spa consultant Rebecca Doyle. The 20metre pool is long enough to take seriously.

Image credit: Vigo Jansons

The hydropool and outdoor vitality pool follow, with an outdoor pool in Cheshire an act of optimism that the sauna, steam and hammam facilities are on hand to insure. All of it sits inside a restorative space crafted from rustic timbers, which after the lacquer is a deliberate change of register. Soliman had an obvious pitfall in view. “A spa this size can easily turn into a corridor of treatment rooms with a pool at the end,” she says. “We wanted this one to belong to the woodland, so the timber is rustic and does most of the work.”

Fairmont Cheshire – The Mere is a clear demonstration of the Bergman Design Studio’s ability to bring scale, material confidence and a strong design identity to a complex restoration. Expanding an established estate while introducing an entirely new layer of luxury required a coherent vision across 116 rooms, the public spaces, restaurants and a 1,715sqm spa. The result is a hotel that feels rooted in its landscape without being bound by its past, giving one of Cheshire’s most established destinations a distinctly contemporary future.

Main image credit: Vigo Jansons