Why the UK’s newest country retreat is placing craft at its core

A white, Grade II-listed house laced with wisteria sits at the heart of Crafted at Powdermills, a 55-room hotel and members’ club opened last month in East Sussex. Once the site of a gunpowder mill, the estate includes a seven-acre lake and outbuildings set within 78 acres of ancient woodland and old pasture. The venture is led by British entrepreneur Chris King and marks the first outpost of his new hotel brand.

Crafted: 'be yourself and fill up on the good stuff'

King, no stranger to the hospitality business, was one of the founders behind Birch – the short-lived hotel and lifestyle brand with sites in Hertfordshire and Selsdon, from which he had departed before its eventual collapse. For King, Birch gave birth to the vision, but Crafted is where he’s refining it. ‘There were so many things about Birch that landed well, and so many things I couldn’t quite do there… ideas kind of germinate with me, and sometimes I can't let them go,’ he says standing in front of the hotel on a bright November afternoon, five days after its official opening.

To the left is a newly created pub and main restaurant, both open to anyone passing along Powdermill Lane. To the right in the oldest part of the house, the atmosphere shifts: members and overnight guests gain access to lounges, a cocktail bar, a gym, paddle-tennis courts, studio spaces and co-working rooms. Local membership is curated rather than sold online – King wants people to understand what they’re joining – and the programme is intentionally broad, from yoga and pottery to cold-water swims.

Many of the ideas from Birch are present here – a rural escape shaped by community, creativity and wellness – but Crafted is deliberately tighter in scale. King talks about shrinking the model to pay closer attention to details: fewer rooms, more care. Having moved out of London to Surrey five years ago, he found himself missing a certain kind of space: somewhere with good light, decent coffee and the ability to work, swim, meet friends and still be back at the school gates by 3pm. Crafted, he says, is an attempt to build that missing piece; a place, as the brand puts it, ‘where you can be yourself and fill up on the good stuff’.

Rooted in craft

It’s an approach King and his team have tried to encapsulate in the name. It’s fair to say that ‘craft’ has become an increasingly diluted word in hospitality design circles, stretched to cover everything from cocktails to toiletries. At Crafted, King is wary of using the term lightly, but determined to give it substance. He describes himself as a design enthusiast rather than a collector, and many of the makers involved in the project were sought out by him personally.

Furniture designer and environmentalist Sebastian Cox was his first phone call. The pair worked together at Birch, where Cox’s estate-sourced furniture became a quiet signature of the brand. At Powdermills, he has gone further: beds, desks, sideboards and coffee tables are made from solid British timber, much of it oak and sycamore sourced from neighbouring Powdermill Wood and other local woodlands. The pieces are robust and unfussy, sitting somewhere between rural vernacular and crisp contemporary.

Craft, King says, is not just about objects but about livelihoods: ‘It’s about giving these makers a voice – a platform to hopefully earn money through classes, commissions or selling their work.’

Hastings-based potter Holly Dawes of The Wonki Pot has moved her studio into a former barn on the estate; she has made at least one lamp for every bedroom, with some of the heritage rooms boasting pairs by the bedside. Elsewhere, her ceramics appear as vases and tableware.

Woodturner Alastair Laburnan, working from a lathe in his garage in Farnborough, has supplied vases and other small pieces. Reception desks and cabinetry have been built by a local joinery firm in Battle; the Sussex terracotta floor tiles – handmade nearby by one of the UK’s last remaining traditional clay-tile producers – ground the public spaces with a warm, earthy tactility; and the hand-painted signage in the pub comes from a specialist sign writer known as The Brilliant Sign Company.

‘Each of these pieces has a story,’ says King. ‘Some things will work, some things won’t – but it’s learning, not fast fashion. I want things that are robust, that last.’

The ambition extends beyond a single fit-out. Crafted is in conversation with organisations such as Heritage Crafts and the Crafts Council about using the hotel as a platform for endangered skills – hosting classes and selling work on site, as well as giving makers exposure to a wider audience. Guests will find a 'makers’ book' in their rooms, almost like a miniature museum guide to who made what, and from where.

Interiors by House of Dré

If the craft story provides the substance, the visual language comes from House of Dré, the London-based studio founded by architect-turned-designer Andreas Christodoulou. Faced with a warren of rooms accumulated over four decades of piecemeal extensions, Christodoulou embraced the complexity. He describes the concept as a 'patchwork quilt': a sequence of spaces stitched together, each with its own mood and palette, but held within a coherent framework.

Where other country hotels err on the side of caution, House of Dré brings informality with splashes of vivid colour and folk-inspired touches – moon-and-star murals, painted stripes, oak-leaf motifs. In the members’ bar – a low-ceilinged room that could easily have felt gloomy – he doubles down on drama with a metallic ceiling, deep coral walls, oak-leaf sconces and a hand-painted mural behind the bar: a star-lit scene of revelry populated by musicians and dancers.

A verdant green ceiling with matching joinery in the library – initially met with raised eyebrows – has proved a success, pulling the busy room together. In the members’ dining room, the hotel’s art curator Despina Wotton has commissioned a romantic ceiling mural painted freehand by local artist Chiara Perano.

The main restaurant takes its cues from the classic country-house orangery, nudging it into a more contemporary direction. A marble-tiled floor and painted panelling are offset by leopard-print cushions and artwork from Southover Gallery, while a central planter filled with foliage breaks up what was once an echoey hall, allowing the room to flex between couples and larger groups.

Throughout, the design works hard to reuse what was already on site. A heavy bookcase from the former library has been dismantled and rebuilt with new chunky shelves; a kitsch landscape painting destined for the skip has been 'redacted' by a local artist into something stranger and more compelling. The cumulative effect is of a house that has been edited and layered, rather than wiped clean.

Upstairs, the tone softens. ‘You can go mad in front-of-house… but in the rooms, it was more about wellness and nature, letting the spaces breathe,’ says Christodoulou. Furnished with oak and sycamore furniture and textiles in earthy palettes, the guest rooms feel calm, with the exception of the bathrooms, drenched in terracotta or emerald green. Another daring choice, Christodoulou fought to keep.

Wild wellness

All of the timber in the rooms is sourced and made in the UK – still rare in hotel projects, where veneer and imported furniture remain the norm. It ties the interiors back to the local landscape and speaks to Cox’s role not only as furniture maker, but also as advisor on woodland management and rewilding. Across the estate, Cox has been helping King understand the site’s wetlands and meadows – described by the team as 'turbochargers for nature' – and to explore ideas from coppicing and meadow restoration to more speculative beaver-style water engineering.

Down by the lake, Crafted’s wellness offer feels closer to a camp than a spa. A wood-fired hot tub looks across the water; beside it sit an ice-cold plunge pool and a mobile sauna on wheels, made by local company Black Pine. The team has taken the costly decision to dredge part of the lake so that the water is deep, clean and safe for swimmers.

They refer to this corner as their 'lakeside wellness' area, where members can move between hot and cold, paddleboard, or simply sit still and take it all in.

Future phases, still in planning, include a run of lakeside suites that would hover above the water and, potentially, a scattering of treehouses or cabins on the far shore, placed so as not to disturb quieter views from the existing bedrooms.

A working model for craft-led hospitality

If Birch was a grand experiment in reshaping the country-house hotel for a creative, post-office crowd, Crafted feels like its more grounded younger cousin. The ambition is still there – to bring together nature, food, wellness, craft and community – but the scale is more manageable. ‘I want this to be a place of creativity,’ says King. ‘Doing things, making things, collaborating with people...that enriches the spaces and enriches people’s lives.’

For now, Crafted at Powdermills reads as an intriguing case: a rural members’ club as interested in woodlands, potters and woodturners as it is in cocktails and co-working. If King and his team can keep that balance – supporting local craftspeople and ecosystems while running a viable business – then the name on the sign may yet prove to be more than a branding exercise.

Membership at Crafted is £180 per month while rooms start at £250 per night staycrafted.com