Birch Community

EXPERIENCE

Birch Community
Holistic hotel and members' space

Things are changing, the emphasis and focus have shifted. Our appreciation of space, nature and provenance are once again rising to the fore, wrestling back analogue pleasures from our digital infatuations, even if we do need to order our locally sourced food and drinks with a QR code. This summer, a new hotel and members’ space opened in Cheshunt, on the outskirts of north London.

Just a 25-minute train ride from Liverpool Street and a local taxi and you’ve arrived. Fifty-five acres of green space and woodlands. You can almost forget where you are (the murmur of the M25 is a gentle reminder). With two restaurants, several bars, a high-tech gym, yoga and meditation classes and workshops including baking, pottery, glass blowing, spoon carving and more, there’s plenty of mindful activity to help leave the stresses behind.

I’m meeting the co-founder Chris Penn in The Hub area, which has shades of London’s ultra-hip Ace Hotel’s once very popular co-working environment, although lighter and brighter thanks to sun streaming through the various roof lights. Previously Penn was Ace Hotel London’s managing director and he left in 2016 to set up on his own. His ambitious new project, Birch Community, had originally been planned to open in May. I’m keen to understand where he sees the balance of his audience, having understood just how easy it is to be here from London. Does Penn see this inviting workspace as a new opportunity he hadn’t foreseen pre-Covid?

‘It was never our intention to promote Birch as a place to work,’ he says. ‘We wanted to create a place where people could play and work and live harmoniously together, but it just so happens that people are now looking for a new place to work.’

While there are positives from the changes we’ve had enforced upon us; less commuting, more time with immediate family, our pets, our gardens, we will now be looking for a balance. This is something Penn believes Birch can offer. ‘The danger of working from home is the lack of separation,’ he says, ‘a kind of cloudy greyness between home and work, for many this won’t be sustainable long term.’

Penn knows a thing or two about finding the elusive work/life balance, it’s an area he’s explored to extreme measures. His time at the Ace Hotel, which he joined in 2013 when it opened, left a lasting impression, he says – in particular from the late Alex Calderwood (the Ace hotel founder) – on how to lead, how to be yourself and create an environment in which anyone can be free and not be judged.

‘After the success of Ace, I gained the confidence to trust in myself, I had good ideas,’ he says now. ‘Based on Alex’s mantra,“If you’re a good person and you do the right things, then hopefully good things will happen”, I thought, I’ve got to go for it. I never wanted to be a hotelier,’ he adds, ‘I hate what that word implies.’

It was the all-consuming element that Penn wished to avoid. ‘I started triathlon in my early twenties. I had a career developing in hotels and then a triathlon career growing nicely; when I wasn’t in the hotel I was out running, on the bike and swimming. My colleagues thought I was weird; “What d’you mean you didn’t work 16 hours recently?” No, I worked eight and got shit loads done and then I went out on the bike! The culture of hotels was more about how long you were there, than the efficiency, the number of people you made happy and the way the business grew.

‘What I really enjoyed from running marathons,’ he continues, ‘was the more endurance I took on, the more I learnt about myself. The more emotionally intelligent I became, the more able I was to build stronger relationships in business. I became fascinated by the mind and the impact it has on our ability to perform as human beings, how much we can achieve and how quickly. I really wanted to delve deeper into that.’ And the best way, he decided, was ‘to take on the most complex mental challenge that I had done’. He chose a solo swim of the English Channel. ‘I was afraid of the sea and couldn’t deal with cold water.’ He completed the challenge in 2015.

Penn wanted to use his own experience to create a more nurturing culture at the heart of his own business. ‘I could see the relationship between the mind and performance outputs, and that there was a need to create more mentally and physically supportive environments for staff and the people who stayed [in hotels]. So I felt with all the experience I’d gained through endurance, and working with great visionaries, I wanted to bring mind and body into hotels.’ So he appointed a Head of Wellness, who holds a weekly Wednesday Wellness drop-in clinic. Or feel the earth between your hands by working on the farm.

‘We put a lot of our expertise around the importance of wellness,’ Penn says, ‘but wellness is also about nature and nature is an incredibly important thing in terms of conscience, care and provenance. And then food, we’ve got to ensure the integrity is there because that flows from wellness and nature. They [then] entwine together to create this immersive experience.’

It’s a thoughtful and considered concept, launched during the most difficult time for the hospitality industry, but those behind Birch have given themselves every chance of succeeding. Just like the soil their farmer Tom is working to improve – with the help of the estate’s pigs, chickens and sheep – put in the time and goodness and great things will come from it. birchcommunity.com