- - I'm Kit Kemp, Design Director for Firmdale Hotels. Every room is like a painted canvas. It has to tell a story. Virginia Woolf states in Street Haunting, it is always an adventure to enter a new room, for the lives and characters of its owners have distilled their atmosphere into it and directly we enter we breast some new wave of emotion. We're in the Charlotte Street Hotel in the Drawing Room. The Drawing Room looks as if it's always been here, but you would never have thought that just 15 years ago, it was a dental warehouse and a warren of very small rooms. We're here in Bloomsbury in London, and when you think of Bloomsbury, you think of the Bloomsbury Set, which were a group of people that got together in the beginning of the 20th Century, pacifists, artists and intellectuals. On our walls here, we have a collection of paintings not only by the Bloomsbury Group, but by other artists that worked at their time. It was a time where they were breaking away from the Victorian straitjacket of society. They had an idea that books and art were much more important than cooking or housekeeping, which actually endeared them to all of us What I try and achieve within a room is that very old fashioned idea of a salon feel because very much evenings were around poetry and actually talking, not the television. We have two Chesterfield type sofas either side of the fireplace, but we've made them more interesting by using two types of tweed, soft gray-blues and almost greens, but the way that we have joined them together is by putting their seams inside out so you're showing the raw edges which are then overlocked in a self-colored thread. It's rather like looking through a kaleidoscope. Everybody has a different way of looking at things, and really, you just need to hone your ideas and have confidence. I always hate a room which looks as if it's wearing high heeled shoes, too fashionable or trying too hard. When the room first is finished, it has to be rather like Norman Fowler said of Colefax and Fowler, "You finish the room, then you put three Labradors in it for a day and half and then it feels like home." One of the paintings is by Roger Fry, who brought the first post-impressionist exhibition to London. He coined the expression post-impressionism. But his paintings that he painted himself are actually really quite traditional, and we have one that takes pride of place in our library next door. We've tried to make it more important by giving it a very wide frame, which is always a good idea if you want someone to notice it. I didn't want the room to be too serious. I didn't want it to be totally Bloomsbury. So we've taken modern designers and we played with the colours, making the chairs look new by using a vibrant fabric. You're building on the traditional. You don't want a pastiche of the past. It has to say something of today. When you're doing your own home, you want to have a feeling that runs through it. Don't just look at it as this is a room, this is a hall, this is a kitchen, this is a bedroom. Try and get some link that goes through it. It doesn't mean that you're not going to have surprises as you go in room to room, but there should be some thread that links through it. And that just makes it much more interesting and easier for you to get ideas and inspiration within a house.