Chester Zoo has opened The Reserve, safari-style lodges to help educate visitors and fund its conservation work.
Designed by Jolie, the 51 lodges, communal “welcome lodge” and lakeside terrace are integrated into the zoo’s Grasslands habitat, allowing vistors to come face-to-face with giraffes, zebras and antelope.
Chester Zoo is one of the UK’s leading conservation zoos.
“As a not-for-profit organisation, each stay at The Reserve directly funds our work in Africa and around the world,” says Kevin Jackson the zoo’s major project lead.
London-based Jolie, which won the job against four other agencies, wasn’t given a detailed design brief.
“We wanted our designers to bring their own creativity to the project, to make it truly unique,” Jackson says.
“We asked for a design that delivered a boutique hotel- style quality, that felt luxury, while still capturing elements of a safari lodge.”
Obviously Chester doesn’t have the same climate as popular safari destinations like Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa. So rather than an exact replica, Jackson says the team wanted, “to capture the sense of luxury and escape that an African safari lodge offers.”
“We didn’t want it to be too theme-y with African styling, or for it to feel brand new,” says Jolie creative director, Sarah Wakefield. “Instead we went for subtle, high-end boutique.”
Jolie drew on Sandibe Okavango Safari Lodge in Botswana, which was revamped in 2014 by Nicholas Plewman Architects and Michaelis Boyd design agency.
The lodges were provided by modular building firm Starship, with Jolie working on their interior plans, including the positioning of the windows.
Some lodges are interconnected, to suit extended families and groups of friends. Because while zoos tend to be designed with children in mind, these lodges are also aimed at the pre-children crowd, Wakefield says, particularly those who are eco-conscious and into animals.
Boutique hotel touches include placing the bed in the centre of the bedroom and the gentle ambient lighting.
Meanwhile, eco credentials include sustainably sourced materials such as the rugs and carpets made from fishing nets and other recycled yarns.
And instead of using interior designers’ go-to material Corian – made by mixing minerals with acrylic resins – for the vanity surfaces, Jolie specified Woodio, a solid composite made from recycled timber.
Aesthetically, the earthy palette and textures, such as the bare plaster in the bathroom, are intended to hint at the savannah and link with the landscape outside. The cushion fabric comes from Coral & Hive, which is made by craftspeople in West Africa.
Jolie Studio’s new lodges for The Reserve at Chester Zoo
In the two-storey welcome lodge, the ground floor has a banquette seat with African grasses planted in its centre, while the open-plan lounge and restaurant are decked out in natural wood and marble.
Upstairs, the bar is moodier and more adult-focused, Wakefield says.
Here, she paired natural materials – the bar front is pebble-dash – with darker colours like navy and midnight blue. “We took those influences from star-gazing.”
The branding for The Reserve was done How&How, who also rebranded the zoo last year.
How&How’s branding for The Reserve at Chester Zoo
“They wanted it to be known as a place of discovery – a world of memorable experiences,” Cat How explains. “They were very keen on us distilling and combining some core elements of the Chester Zoo brand with luxury and a bit of sass.”
The identity includes elegant typography, fluid motion behaviours and animal-print patterns hand-painted by How & How’s senior creative, Eilidh Reid.
“We knew we needed to find a subtle way of tying in The Reserve to the Chester Zoo brand, so using patterns inspired by animals but in a much more crafted way felt like a logical elevation for this luxury offering,” Reid explains.
Each visual combines patterns associated with two or three different animals, to reflect the experience of encountering multiple species at the zoo. And Reid created them in watercolour, to evoke both the lake around which the lodges sit, and because as a medium, “it’s unpredictable, like nature. You don’t know how they’re going to react with each other.”
For the word mark, the rhino horn created using the negative space in the ‘C’ of Chester, reoccurs in the two “R’s of The Reserve.
When it comes to animal-based immersive sleepovers, Chester Zoo is riding a wave. There’s Port Lympne Safari Park’s treehouses in Kent, designed in 2015 by Tara Bernerd and Partners, the Safari Lodges at the West Midlands Safari Park, designed by Newman Gauge, and the Yorkshire Wildlife Park has the Hex Wildlife Hotel.
Jolie Studio’s new lodges for The Reserve at Chester Zoo
Jolie Studio’s new lodges for The Reserve at Chester Zoo
Jolie Studio’s new lodges for The Reserve at Chester Zoo
Jolie Studio’s new lodges for The Reserve at Chester Zoo