Suppliers of artwork, mirrors and bric-a-brac, Portobello Art is an artwork consultant with nearly 30 years experience in the interior design, hotel and leisure industries. Specialising in producing bespoke artwork, Portobello Art design, source and manufacture images to meet a detailed brief, taking schemes from the concept stage through to production and installation.
Our clients range from large international hotel groups (Hilton & IHG) to privately owned hotels, leisure resorts (CenterParcs), Care Home Groups (Cambian) as well as many designers and architects.
The hospitality market is becoming increasingly competitive and most hoteliers and designers are now realising this. Consequently creative and imaginative artwork plays a significant role in promoting the unique identity of a hotel and is recognised as being a key component of creating the feel and atmosphere and bringing colour, vitality and inspiration to all environments.
At Portobello we understand that every customer and every project is different. We will work together with our clients to develop and create bespoke imagery (all manufactured in-house) that is innovative and practical and stands out from the crowd whether for a single project or for brand rollouts. Our reputation has been built on the personal, friendly and reliable service of our designers and the proven ability to create and deliver quality hand crafted artwork on time and within budget.
The range of artwork we offer is enormous from framed and canvas prints to original painted artwork and faux oils to one-piece digital wallpaper, all hand crafted and produced in-house at our premises in Sevenoaks.
Framed and Canvas Artwork
There are so many ways to display framed artwork depending on the environment – go for the gallery wall of art hung as an eclectic group of different style images using quirky frame shapes and sizes for corridors or have large oversized framed mirrors (or prints) to add impact in a function room or hang just one colourful canvas print in the bedrooms.
Painted Artwork
Over the years we have had more and more requests for original painted artwork and we therefore now have several artists working for us on a regular basis, both in-house and freelance.
But due to the cost of originals we’ve now devised a method of creating ‘faux oils’. The two images above show humidors in two London hotels where we sourced the images of cigar smoking celebrities, printed them onto canvas in the normal way and then had them over painted by one of our artists and framed in a mixture of ornate gold and black frames. The third photo is of the Staybridge Suites on the Olympic Site where our client wanted something wacky and dramatic in their reception area, but in an Olympic theme of course, so we decided to put an ice cream cone on top of the orbit – which just goes to show, you’re only limited by your own imagination!
Digitally Printed ‘One Piece’ wallpaper
Digitally printed wallpaper has been popular for years for feature walls in open spaces, but ONE PIECE wallpaper has gone one step further.
This eradicates any previous issues, such as joining intrinsic designs seamlessly, as the ‘One Piece’ covers expansive areas eliminating the need for seams. This has now given us the ability to create enormous collages made up of numerous individual images which was not previously possible – see above examples at the Holiday Inn, Liverpool Lime Street and Doubletree by Hilton, Islington and the fabulous image of the racehorse “Whistlejacket“ used as one huge image for the stairwell at the Holiday Inn, Huntingdon.
Bric-a-Brac for Open Lobby Concept
One new trend which seems to have captured the imagination of most upmarket hotels is the Open Lobby Concept – transforming the traditional hotel lobby format by combining the front desk, lobby, restaurant, bar, lounge area and business centre into one open, cohesive space. Holiday Inn, part of IHG, were one of the first hotel groups to try this out when they launched it in their brand new Holiday Inn at Brentford Lock in March 2013.
Portobello Art were delighted to be contracted to provide all the wallpaper, artwork and decorative accessories for this first project and have since completed over 20 Holiday Inns all over the UK during the last 3 years. And other Hotel groups are now following this trend with open lobbies appearing in Hilton Hotels, (Doubletree, Garden Inn and Hampton), Mercure and Millennium for many of which we’ve provided all the artwork and bric-a-brac as well.
For more information visit our website at www.portobelloart.co.uk, email sales@portobelloart.co.uk or call 01732 454000.
