- - I'm Kit Kemp, Design Director for Firmdale Hotels. Every room is like a painted canvas. It has to tell a story. It's lunchtime in the Ham Yard Restaurant and Bar. We can see the chef busy working away, behind the glass in there. It's quite a large space. The ceiling height is about 22 feet, and it's very long. So, very often spaces that are very long get very dark and dismal at one end. But we've actually added a sky light, and beneath the sky light are Martha Freud's beautiful, porcelain pots. And each pot has a design of a leaf on it, just pin pointed, and lit inside by a lamp, which then gives a glow. When you're dealing with an area which is actually this big, the difficulty is to make it intimate, so that you have areas within it, where you feel like you're the only person, and you feel that the place can be your own. I think really, that the bar, was the start of the inspiration for these two rooms. I bought a collection of West Indian black and white paintings, by an artist called Raz Ishrey, and the Raz Ishreys, I thought, would look really good against something quite rustic above the bar. So, in the bar, we have boxes. Just ordinary wooden boxes, which we've then painted, with abstract designs in just black and white. And it's the black and white, which actually is quite a strength, and quite calm beside the yellow willow weave walls. Many restaurants that I've been in recently, are a formula, and what I don't want our restaurants to be is a formula. I don't want it look like a French brasserie. I don't want them to look like an American eating house. I want them to have their own, individual style. And what I've tried to achieve here, is something which says something about us, and nobody else. Design is all about the detail. And, for example, if you just look at the design of the seat here. You've got a leather hand pull. And then, in between the two colours, you've got our felt, which has been pinked, and just gives that little judge of orange, between the two colours here. But it's actually the art work in the room, which gives it its life. And why just have one thing when you can have many. As you go around the room, we have the Opera de Paris, costumes dated between 1920 and 1950, framed in a certain way, in the same colours as the actual banquette seating. As one picture, they don't work, but as a collection of pictures, they become extremely interesting. By creating something which is individual, it's never going to be in fashion, and it's never going to be out of fashion. It's quality, and it's going to last.