an interview with…

Robin Hutson

Kicking off our series of retrospective interviews with some of the industry’s most respected names in hospitality is an interview with hotelier Robin Hutson.

Having launched, developed and sold two of Britain’s best loved home-grown hotel collections in Hotel du Vin and The PIG hotels, Robin and his wife Judy are looking forward to a well-earned retirement.

Over the years we have had the pleasure of reviewing their hotels and have interviewed Robin on several occasions. He has always been generous, amiable and open with his views. We wish Robin and Judy a long and happy future together.

Proud Suppliers to The PIG hotels

On technology: “Now, it’s a part of your arsenal of weapons to be able to use the internet when sourcing suppliers.” Robin Hutson.

Then and now

GS Do you think the younger generation of workers have a better or worse attitude than 40 years ago?

RH There’s plenty said about the work ethic of today’s generation. I started as a management trainee in 1975 at The Savoy Group and my first job was at Claridge’s. I was a commis waiter there at the age of eighteen. Our contract was six days a week, split shifts, and ten hours a day. I earned £21 a week and I paid £10.50 for rent. I’m not suggesting that that’s a great way to start a career, but it does say a lot about the working environment at the time. And about the expectations of the employer at the time.

These days we have a lot of people on four-day weeks, they choose to work four longer shifts and then take three days off.

GS Is that a choice you give them?

RH Yes. We’ve found that we need to be far more flexible than we used to be.

The other thing about working back in 1975 was the food they provided. It was quite disgusting! We would compare it to a workhouse.

GS What made you stick at it?

RH Well, we knew that everything we did was just a part of the overall programme and that we would be moved on to other departments, where the conditions might be better.

And having said all that, it was great fun! Within a few months we went from knowing absolutely nothing to serving the Queen at State banquettes and just about every VIP and A List celebrity in between. I remember Clint Eastwood being there, Bing Crosby, Meryl Streep, and all manner of royals from overseas. It was incredible.

GS Would you say that it was a good grounding, for those who got through the training? Better than today?

RH No, not better but different. Back then, many of us were committed to a career in hospitality and we would do whatever it took to progress. Now, a lot of youngsters are just passing through hospitality on their way to something else. Frankly, I do not think the industry today would survive without the kids who are on their way to and from university. So, we must treat those people in a quite different way.

Technology

GS How has technology changed the hospitality industry?

RH Well, back then, almost everything was manual. Bookings were made direct by telephone, or by telex and then, a little later, by fax. Everything was recorded on paper and filed. One of my earlier placements was working in the Bill Office at the Berkeley Hotel. It was a room directly behind reception, and we had these massive computers, each one was the size of a sofa! Every transaction would be written down and manually transferred onto cards that were then fed into the machine to produce a printed bill. These would be returned via a vacuum tube system that ran through the walls of the hotel. We’d put the printed cards back into the little torpedo-like capsules and off they’d go! The real problem with the system was that nothing ever seemed to balance.

I can’t even begin to understand today’s technology, how different software programmes knit together to make a hotel run. Technology now is amazing, but I feel I’m too old to learn it.

Pivotal moments

GS In 1994 you opened the first Hotel du Vin in Winchester, in partnership with Gerard Basset, who you worked with at Chewton Glen. What made it so popular?

RH There was nothing quite like it in the provinces then, so we were the first to launch a hotel of that kind in the area. The food scene was starting to change in London, and I was inspired by that. It was the birth of what we now refer to as modern British food. We had been open for about six weeks when the most important restaurant critic at the time, Jonathan Meades, came to visit. I knew Jonathan as he had been to Chewton Glen before, when I was GM. He was so intelligent and knowledgeable about food, and he was so influential that he could pretty much close a restaurant by writing a poor review! Fortunately, he completely understood what we were about and wrote a fantastic full- page review in the Saturday Times.

GS Did he mark you out of ten?

RH He gave us a six out of ten. For him that was a good score, but we were never about fine-dining, and he got that. What he did say was that what we were doing, was the future. He didn’t ‘gush’ over anything, his writing was intelligent and fair, but it was an enthusiastic review from the country’s leading critic and that was a pivotal moment for us.

Because of that, loads of journalists started booking in, and Jonathan had given them the lead. He’d already written about the nuance and the simplicity of our offer, so journalists weren’t then trying to compare us with top restaurants or swanky hotels in London.

The Hotel du Vin years

GS You sold Hotel du Vin as a group of hotels in 2004, a decade after you launched it. Did you start off with a ten-year business plan?

RH No. When we opened in Winchester we were trying to survive from day to day. We had purchased the property and used every spare penny on the build. There was no reserve. We didn’t employ too many people, because we couldn’t afford to. Gerard and I used to sleep on the sofa at night because we were the night porter as well as everything else! We didn’t draw much of a wage either, but we got to the end of the first year and found that we had made some money. We used that to invest in building more rooms at the back of the hotel, so that gave us a bit more scale.

Eventually, we got it right. The restaurant was busy every day and full at weekends. We weren’t too expensive, so we were picking up a lot of corporate business during the week. Occupancy levels were remarkably high, so things were going very well. And we started to think that it would be possible to take on a second site in a similar sort of town. So, we found the next site in Tunbridge Wells. The building was perfect and that became our second hotel.

GS Were you beginning to build your empire at that stage?

RH I don’t think we were seriously looking beyond the two hotels, but then something happened, which I think was our second pivotal moment. There was a guy who used to come and stay with us, called Ian McGlinn. He was a fan of Hotel du Vin. I knew him from the Chewton Glen days. And he was extremely wealthy, having made his money from being the main investor behind Body Shop. When Anita Roddick couldn’t get her investment from the bank, she got it from Ian. Anyway, he ended up owning a large chunk of Body Shop and made his fortune from it.

Ian was having lunch one day at Hotel du Vin in Tunbridge Wells, when he said to me “If you ever need any more investment, just let me know.” He loved what we were doing and wanted to help us grow the brand. So, we set up a meeting. He brought along his mate, Gordon Roddick, who was married to Body Shop owner, Anita Roddick, and between them they agreed to invest £5 million. That money gave us the seed capital to do the next two hotels, in Bristol and Birmingham.

Then we had the momentum to expand, and we opened the next three hotels in Brighton, Harrogate, and Henley. We were careful about how we picked the properties. In all those cities and towns, we were I think the first boutique hotel.

About Hotel du Vin

The Henley Hotel du Vin epitomises the HdV ethos: an unusual and much-loved local building has been tastefully converted and subtly enhanced and, within it, a stylish and quality provision has been created.

GS Magazine 2005

GS Were you aware of the other boutique hotels that were making the headlines?

RH Absolutely. Malmaison, for example, was doing well. The founder of Malmaison, Ken McCulloch, opened his first hotel in the same year as us. They were in Scotland but there were similarities between the two brands. Not least the French names. Then there was Jonathan Wix, with 42 The Calls in Leeds. And Jeremy Mogford in Oxford with The Old Parsonage and The Old Bank hotels. There was a little bit of comradery between us. It felt like a new movement in the hotel world.

Soho House

GS Is that when you took on your role at Soho House?

RH I was still running Hotel du Vin when Nick Jones asked me to help him. He had never opened a country house hotel before and asked me to help. I became a non-executive director for a few years. And then, when we sold Hotel du Vin, Nick asked me to become Chairman of Soho House. Nick and I travelled a lot, especially in New York, to look at what others were doing, like Ian Schrager and Paramount and so on, so I was learning a lot.

GS Why did you sell Hotel du Vin?

RH We knew that the hotels were going to have some value at some stage and Peter Chittick, our Finance Director, had started to put the structure together so they would be easier to sell as a going concern when the time was right. We thought that we could get to ten hotels. We were at seven at that stage and had done a deal on the Cambridge site although we hadn’t developed it. And then we got a call from MWB, who had already bought Malmaison. We felt that they would be a good fit with Hotel du Vin, and they made us a good offer. We had never taken much money out of the business so, to us, it was a nice payday!

GS You had to sign a non-competition clause?

RH I did, but that didn’t affect the work I was already doing with Soho House. So not long after the sale I was practically working full time there.

GS Did you help to raise finance for Soho House?

RH I was a part of the process. We needed to raise money. We had already been involved getting a number of investors to take smaller stakes, but then Richard Caring appeared. And we ended up selling the majority stake to him. By doing that I was effectively putting myself out of a job, because I wasn’t really a part of Caring’s methodology. I stayed on to project manage the new hotel in Miami but there was no real meeting of the minds between Caring and myself, so I decided it was best for me to go.

Lime Wood Hotel

GS What did you do after leaving Soho House?

RH I had a call from Jim Ratcliffe, who needed help opening Lime Wood Hotel in the New Forest. It was known as Parkhill House at that time.

GS What was wrong with it?

RH It was a building site! The project was a bit out of control, and there were too many people involved. Jim thought it was going to cost £20 million but by the time I got involved it had already cost £40 million. The building was beautiful and a remarkable quality, but it was rudderless, with some very muddled concepts. I suggested that Jim appoint me as Chair, which he agreed to do, and eventually we opened the hotel in 2008.

I ‘iced’ the spa at the time, as that was even more confused than the hotel, so we opened the spa 12 months later. It needed redesigning; there were not enough treatment rooms, the configuration was wrong, so we knew it would take longer than the hotel.

GS Do you think that Robin Hutson, the hotelier and businessman, was forged from all these past experiences?

RH Yes, I do. But I am also the kind of person who doesn’t stop. If I commit myself to something I give it my all until it’s done. That is more to do with my nature than my business experience.

About The PIG

For those who wish to see a successful hospitality business in action look no further than the PIG collection of hotels. From a customer’s point of view, it would be difficult to find fault with the PIG experience.

GS Magazine 2024

The first PIG

GS At what stage did you launch The PIG hotels?

RH Well, after Lime Wood had opened, I began to ‘tidy’ up the business. There were several bits of property that went with Lime Wood, and I was tidying those up. There was a half open restaurant, a wholesale meat supply company, and all sorts of random things that I needed to decide what to do with. The last thing was a small hotel, called Whitley Ridge, near Brockenhurst. I had it valued to sell but the valuation wasn’t very appealing.

And then I had one of those ‘light bulb’ moments. I was standing in the walled kitchen garden, looking around at all the weeds and I suddenly saw the potential. So, I bought 50% and Jim retained the other 50%.

GS Was it a daunting prospect, starting from nothing again?

RH It was exciting! Practically everything we did to the hotel, we’d done elsewhere so I knew what to expect: how to cope with the property development, how to deal with the finances, recruitment and staff management, meeting deadlines, and so on, so we felt very confident about what we were doing.

The only thing that was daunting to me was its location out in the countryside. Everything we had done before was city or town based, and I was concerned that no one would want to travel out to the restaurant on a wet Tuesday afternoon in February! As it turned out, the restaurant has been a phenomenal success. It’s been pretty much full, lunch and dinner, since we opened.

GS Creating a successful hotel means getting everything right, but it starts with the location and the building. How do you know that the properties you select are going to work?

RH We put an enormous amount of time and effort into selecting the buildings, for Hotel du Vin and for The Pig. You need to ‘kiss a lot of frogs’ when you are looking at properties before you find the right one. I’m proud that we’ve never settled for second best. Both brands have an extraordinary portfolio of properties. And there are two new ones in the pipeline for The Pig that are equally as good, one in Warwickshire and another one in Kent.

GS Do you think that the PIG brand would work equally well in the north of the country?

RH I don’t see why not. But the new owners, KSL, who are an American hospitality and private equity house, normally have a ‘hold’ period in mind, in terms of how long they would want to own a business. And because of Covid and the economic difficulties that we’ve seen in recent years, I think we’re a bit behind where they wanted to be. We’ve only opened the one hotel in the last two and a half years and the plan was to look at opening one a year. And the planning situation hasn’t helped, it’s so slow to get things passed in this country, so I’m not sure what we could have done.

As far as the north is concerned, I could see a Pig hotel working well near Edinburgh, or Glasgow, or Dublin, or Cheshire, anywhere really. We’ve looked hard, at various places, but struggled to find appropriate buildings.

Design

GS Has technology helped you with the interior design of your hotels?

RH Yes, in two ways, and both are about speeding up the design process. CAD designs are now so fast and accurate that we quickly learn what the room dimensions are, down to the millimetre, so we can work out precisely what furniture we can use in any given room. Secondly, it’s about sourcing furniture. Going online we can get most of what we need in a fraction of the time it used to take. We were continually traipsing around antique shops to find the vintage furniture we wanted to fill a hotel, whereas now, with the internet, we can do it all from one desk, without having to leave the room. Sometimes you need to see it, if it’s an important piece, but the legwork involved in sourcing furniture is almost a thing of the past.

Of course, with fabrics, Judy would still need to go out, because you need to physically see and feel the material to get it right, so that process hasn’t changed.

GS What inspires you in design?

RH Neither Judy or I are trained designers and in many ways that is an advantage. Firstly, we buy the things that we like. And we quite like imperfection. We like things to look as though they’ve been put together gradually and not bought all at once. With The Pig hotels, we’ve tried to create ‘evolved interiors’ as if they’ve been added to over time. Like you would find in a house where old furniture might sit alongside newer pieces. We wanted to create spaces that feel comfortable, warm, and welcoming, but never challenging. The hotels’ interiors are in many ways an extension of us and our home.

And it helps when you have a number of go-to suppliers that you can turn to for the things you’re always going to need in the hotel, like Trade Linens, Designers Guild for fabrics, George Smith for upholstery, Julian Chichester for the beds, baths from Aston Matthews, Linney Cooper the flooring people, and Tekne, the contractors.

The design is hugely personal to us and therein lies the challenge. A new team of designers for the next generation of Pigs won’t necessarily think and feel the same way that we do.

GS Do you always buy British?

RH Well, we buy from British retailers and suppliers. But as much as possible we try to buy pre-owned, vintage furniture. That’s a part of our sustainability story anyway, and some of those pieces may well have originated from other countries.

GS Design is an integral part of the success story of both Hotel du Vin and The Pig hotels. The rooms are always a pleasure to walk into. How do you know when you’ve got it right and when to stop in the design process?

RH Judy and I have done these things with real heart and love. We spent time working hard on every room. We would fret over every detail, every little mistake. We’d become idiosyncratic.

Sometimes we got it very wrong. We would buy something for a room but then decide it just didn’t work in the space, so we’d put that in storage and start again. But we sit in the rooms, we consider them, we take our time, and we tweak endlessly. I love hanging pictures, and I would be constantly moving them around the room during the design process. I know it drives Judy to distraction, but I won’t stop until I feel that I couldn’t do it any better. And then, when we think it’s done, we test it. We sleep in every bed, we shower and bathe in every bathroom, we dine at every table in the restaurant. I think that is the key, we only stop when it feels right.

GS Is there a formula?

RH Usually, we will look for and buy one piece, and everything else hangs off that. So, the centrepiece might be a chandelier or a great dresser. It’s rarely the same, but from that one piece, Judy will start putting together the colours, and the textures, and the fabrics, and the additional furniture and so on.

 The best parts of hospitality

GS What aspect of your work have you enjoyed the most?

RH The most rewarding thing has been taking youngsters who haven’t had a clear direction in life and helping them to develop and find a career. In the past few weeks we’ve been to all of our hotels to say our goodbyes, and the stories we’ve heard, time and time again, have been from the younger people who have found a purpose in their lives through working with us and now feel like they are a part of something special. It’s been quite overwhelming at times. But we’ve got lots of young people who have been with us for five years, some for more than ten years, and in hospitality that’s unusual.

Apart from that, I love being involved in the food and wine side of the business. That’s the pleasure!

GS What’s the most important, staff or guests?

RH I would say staff. Of course, everyone is important, but I do believe that you get the clientele that you deserve. And it’s the staff who create the environment in the first place. I genuinely think that there’s a unique and natural warmth at the Pig hotels and at Lime Wood. And that is something that you don’t always see at other hotels.

GS Is the hospitality industry in better shape now than it was 30 years ago?

RH British food and British service has come on a long, long way in thirty years. You just need to look at the high street brands now to see what I mean. These days, you are more likely to have an acceptable meal on the high street, than an unacceptable meal. You can get a very decent pizza or pasta dish, for example, from any number of clean and professionally managed restaurants on the high street. And service is immeasurably better in the mid-market sector than it ever was.

Interestingly, that has not been the case in every country. In France, they’ve gone the other way. Things are worse there now than they ever used to be, but a lot of that is due to an attitude problem.

There was a renewed respect for the industry during Covid. People often appreciate things more when they’ve been taken away from them. And that happened in hospitality. Thankfully, we had real and genuine support from our customers.

Government recognition

GS Do you think that the government need to do more for hospitality?

RH Well hospitality represents 10% of the workforce in this country, which means that there is a huge and direct benefit to the Exchequer. And if you want to attract new business and high wealth people into the country you need to ensure that you have something to offer. If people are going to relocate and live somewhere else, they want it to be an exciting country that’s full of culture, and one with a really good and vibrant hospitality sector. And that means decent food and good hotels. Hospitality has a role for this country that’s way beyond the vast revenue that we generate. The hospitality sector is, and continues to be, completely undervalued by the government.

GS What should the government do to help the hospitality industry?

RH For some time I have been at the forefront of trying to campaign for a Minister for Hospitality. At present the system is not well structured, with responsibility for hotels and restaurants under separate departments. And then the areas of arts, and theatre and museums under yet another department. It’s just not joined up!

Even for our little part in it all, over the years we’ve created thousands of jobs, and we’ve renovated a number of old buildings to a high standard. But the governments of the day never seemed to recognise or support what we were doing. Small businesses, the SMEs in hospitality, like ours, have had no support and yet collectively, we contribute a lot. If we were Toyota, opening a plant and creating a thousand jobs, they’d be all over us like a rash. It’d be front page news!

I think that what successive governments have failed to grasp is that we British are entrepreneurs. We’re actually good at creating small businesses, but not so good at creating big ones. Harnessing that and celebrating it for what it is would be a good start.

GS Do you think the government will ever listen?

RH Well, the irony is that when Boris Johnson was PM, and before he had completely blotted his copy book, he made a couple of private visits with his wife, Carrie, to The Pig. So, Judy and I got to know them a bit and they were, as you can imagine, very engaging company. On their second visit, we were having drinks with them, and Boris said to me “Robin, what could the government do to help your sector?” So, I said, “I’d love you, as Prime Minister, to be the champion of our sector, banging the drum at every given chance. But if you’re serious about this, I’ll happily bring together a table of interesting and prominent people from the industry for a lunch, where you’d have a chance to meet them and hear what they have to say.”

Boris and Carrie both liked the idea, and the following Monday I received a call from his secretary inviting us to a lunch at Downing Street. I really thought something good was about to happen, but, by Thursday, Boris was out! It was so frustrating really because if you want something changing in government, it’s all about getting to the Prime Minister, and we were that close!

PIG hotels photographer: Jake Eastham