New venture: chef Florence Knight and artist Jonny Gent
(Picture: Press handout )The team behind popular Clerkenwell restaurant Sessions Arts Club, which months after it first opened remains booked out weeks in advance, are heading to Scotland to launch a sister project, Boath House. It is expected to open this June.
Co-founders Jonny Gent, an artist, and the chef Florence Knight, alongside Soho House architect Russell Potter, will launch the new venture close by Nairn. The small coastal town in the Highlands sits some half an hour north of Inverness, and Boath House fills large grounds just inland from it.
As with Sessions, the new venture is expected to be extremely glamorous; photos on Google Maps show a grand Georgian country house, and Gent and Potter are understood to have heavily renovated the space, which the trio are billing as “a bolt hole in the woods for the lost artist to start again.”
It is also being dubbed a “sanctuary for creatives”, mimicing the way Gent described the Arts Club in an interview with the Standard last summer.
Details of the project remain scant, though it will offer a number of rooms for guests, as well as two restaurants. Knight — who prior to Sessions made her name as head chef of Polpetto — will oversee all of the food. There will also be a walled garden and cabins, and, judging from the Boath House Instagram account, a number of studio spaces.
Beside the food, art will unsurprisingly play a key role in the project, with Gent inviting a select few artists, writers, chefs and musicians to take residence in the House. The trio add that the venture will be “built on the pillars of art, food, music and supplies”.
More details are expected to be announced shortly.
