THE FELLOWSHIP & STAR
The Fellowship & Star is the third project I have designed for my client Rob Star, owner of a constellation of Star Pubs across London. This was a wonderful challenge as the venue is a 1920’s Grade II listed building and has undergone a huge restoration, taking close to 4 years. Originally called The Fellowship in Bellingham, the building comprises a cinema, a pub, a music venue and a cafe with an outdoor patio seating area. The venue is famous for being the hang out of British Boxing Champion Henry Cooper, who trained in the back rooms while preparing for his legendary fight with Mohammed Ali in 1966.
We wanted to retain the original features as much as possible in the pub, and as the building is listed we were of course restricted by planning. We worked alongside Architects Thomas Ford who restored the shell of the building and installed the brand new state of the art cinema. Every window was restored to its former glory, panelling and timber parquet floor painstakingly restored by carpenters. Much of the inner structure was reconfigured and so to retain this ‘story’ we kept much of the old building ‘carcass’ still visible. I continued to work with some of our established themes of circular globe lighting to suggest planets and stars, bespoke constellation ceiling wallpaper graphics, and bright colourful flowery wallpapers. We worked with an overall palette of greys and used a dark red accent colour with teal blues, and dusty pinks.
One of my favourite parts of the process is buying the artwork and for many of the walls we sourced old Getty photos of Henry Cooper training in the Fellowship and old boxing posters of Cooper’s fight with Ali.
The music venue we named The Space and spacey artwork was sourced from a wonderful artist, Daren Thomas Magee https://realfunwow.com/ Our bespoke wallpaper on the ceiling and walls of The Space was created by Edouard Lyons at graphic design studio http://www.lyonsandtigers.co.uk/
