- - I'm Kit Kemp, design director for Firmdale Hotels. Every room is like a painted canvas. It has to tell a story. What would you do if you were presented with a very large space? Well, I think I'd like a party. In this area, we've got the Croc, which is our bowling alley, the Dive Bar, a fabulous bar, which leads into the theatre, the  spill-out area, the Windmill room, Sherwood room, and the Archer room. Greeting you as you come into the Croc is our collection of about 70 old bowling shoes. And these were collected on eBay over a period of about a year and a half. And the collection is surrounded by old bowling balls. I had never designed a bowling alley before, and in fact, I'd never been in a bowling alley that I wanted to remain in for more than two minutes. So that was going to be a challenge. I thought one of the ideas was to actually have good art on the walls. So we have two of Howard Hodgkin's largest pieces that he's every painted. Howard Hodgkin is one of our better-known painters. He's a contemporary artist, living today. They're called As Time Goes By, and one is predominantly red, and the other blue. And I'm so glad that we had the space that they could actually stand side-by-side. It's very rare to have an area where you can actually enjoy all those fabulous, colourful splotches, and that predominates on one wall, opposite a 1950s bowling alley, which was actually brought over from Texas. It's got fabulous wings, solid maple floors, and the balls actually come above the ground, rather than beneath. They're lit with sort of neon lights, and at the far end, there's a brick wall with candles that are glowing within them. The Dive Bar is about 40 feet in height. If you look at it as a space, it just looks like a great big cardboard box, so we thought we'd have a diver diving from the mezzanine floor right over onto the bar. And there are those connotations of a dive as well. So we felt that this was great name. At one end of the bar, we've got a fabulous African chandelier, made out of of mud beads. And at the other end of the bar, we've got some fabulous old vintage lights. One is a wedding chapel, one is a freak show, one says Hotel. And it just gives a kind of vibey atmosphere. I think the one thing about using colour is that it makes people happy. What I wanted to achieve down here was a sense of theatre. This is a theatrical space, and everyone within it is a player.