Most hospitality projects do not need someone like me. The brief is too small, the ambition stops at “MVP”, or the work is not asking enough of what design can do for wellbeing. Long Lane is different.
Congratulations on the website launch. The pacing is what I noticed first. Each transition is intentionally slow, scene-setting, holding you in a frame just long enough to feel its weight. A slow unveiling after an exhale. Not many hospitality sites trust their visitors with that kind of stillness. You have, beautifully. And the community events you have started running are already doing what a brand like this needs to do early. Building intimacy in the run-up to the doors opening, so by the time members walk in, the room is already warm.
Your newsletter mentioned phase two, the booking page and membership platform. That is the surface I am most excited about, and where I can add the most.
For the last decade I have led design for some of the world's largest entertainment brands. Sky, Shazam, Comcast, Vevo, Red Bull, Vodafone. The work was about immersive experiences. Onboarding millions of people into something that earned their attention and their loyalty. The craft of it is invisible when it works.
I wanted to translate that craft into wellness, which is why I founded Hue & Heal, my design studio and lab. The world I want to design is no longer the one making people glued to a couch, mirroring your relationship with alcohol and what Long Lane is choosing instead. It is one where immersion comes from making your body feel good, from people sharing joy, laughter and meaningful moments. Technology as a silent partner, holding the experience together rather than being the experience. Long Lane is the venue I would love to build that craft for.
Here is what I see when I think about your booking and membership platform. The booking experience does the heavy lifting. By the time a member submits, the platform already knows enough about them, their preferences, their goals, what they are arriving to reset from, that the visit itself can be pre-built around them. So when they arrive, as if by magic, the experience has arrived to welcome them. Room comfort tuned. A welcome ritual chosen for that person. Restaurant menu already aligned. A smoothly running order of the day. Not a programme, but a ritual that spans the day, because “programme” sounds binary and what you are building is anything but.
Three short stories underneath this thinking, so you know what shaped it.
First, Revivo in Bali. I attended a retreat there, and the journal each guest received, the item meant to hold the experience together, was the piece that added the most cognitive dissonance. Beautiful in intention. Confused in execution. It left guests more uncertain about their schedules than oriented by them. I left thinking about how often the connective tissue of a wellness experience is the part that quietly fails it.
Second, Remedae, my own product in early development under Hue & Heal. Remedae exists because most people learn the hard way that the healing they are looking for already exists in the world. The most valuable assets to human life are already around us, and the work is in bringing people into right relationship with them. Remedae does this with the world's healing traditions. Long Lane does it with the land, the food, the body, the community.
Third, a tour I was recently invited on at the newly opened Six Senses London. The facilities are exactly what you would expect, world-class on every spec. The missing element was truly being immersed in nature. Long Lane already has it. Curating the guest experience around that is exactly the work I want to be part of.
There is a longer piece on how I think about arrival on the Hue & Heal Journal, “This one moment defines the entire guest experience, and most hotels get it wrong,” if useful.
I am a designer who wants to build with people who actually understand the impact of great experience design. So here I am, writing to see where this can be written into the story of Long Lane.
A short conversation feels like the right next step. I am London-based and can come to West Sussex or anywhere nearby any week that suits.
Write back to me.
Read my story here.
