As a company, Fairland Contractors is well known throughout our industry. So when journalist, Jessica Furseth wrote an article for the online magazine, Huck, she contacted Fairland, pub refurbishment specialists, for comment.
The article begins:
The UK pub is a dying breed, with thousands being shut down or bought out by big chains. For many, refurbishments are a way of staying relevant – but is it ever possible to do up a local and truly keep its spirit?
But it goes on to explore the good way and bad way to complete a pub refurbishment with comment from Andrew Davison, Camra’s Pub Design Awards coordinator.
At Fairland, we know we carry out pub refurbishment the ‘good way’, our clients tell us that.
Here is a section of the article with input from of one of our director’s, Louise Sutherland, as a pub refurbishment specialist.
Extract from the Huck Magazine article:
A good pub is a community. A refurb needs to be well thought through because unless it’s brilliant, any change will be bad. But Louise Sutherland, a director at pub refurbishment specialist Fairland Contractors, tells me there’s a lot of renovation activity in London these days, across traditional as well as modern pubs. “There’s a lot of small breweries that want to do a really good refurbishment,” she says. “The bigger breweries are also doing a fair bit.”
Fairland has just finished refurb on the Star of the East in Commercial Road, and the company also worked on the Marquis of Cornwallis in Bethnal Green, The Victoria in Paddington (owned by Fuller’s, who Sutherland describes as a “sympathetic restorer”), and the Crowne Plaza bar in Blackfriars. The current trends are all about outside seating and living walls, wallpapers with strong patterns, ornate features such as monkey lamps, softer seating (getting more women into pubs is a goal), and stuff that looks good on Instagram. Sutherland acknowledges that being too trendy can make spaces look dated: “But pubs get a lot of wear and tear. When your basics are good you can always do an update.”
Sutherland says a simple do-up isn’t rocket science: paint the walls, get rid of the wires, put up some decent pictures and maybe some bric-a-brac, get the lighting right – and don’t rush it. “But the one thing that absolutely makes a great refurb is a good designer. You can tell a mile off if there’s been a designer or if people have done it themselves,” she says. If not, the risk is that it can look tatty: “More often than not, you need someone to come in and help you. You [want] a designer who’s sympathetic to the pub’s history.”
Read the full article HERE.
Our thanks to Jessica Furseth for allowing us to include extracts from her article.
