During winter, when there are so few daylight hours, we sometimes feel like we’re losing time. At Kit Kemp Design Studio we’re working around the clock for our guests, so we take every opportunity to celebrate the art of telling time!

Covent Garden Hotel is our most traditional hotel, so we felt the reception area would not be complete without a ‘crown jewel’ – an antique clock ticking proudly on the trompe l’oeil wall under the stone stairs.

In the wood panelled Drawing Room, an ornamental eighteenth century Swedish clock sits above the Japanese Marquetry bureau, which is contrasted with a contemporary and streamlined Joh Stefanidis chair.

At Ham Yard Hotel, we are reminded that “the clock ticks on and there is no way back”. Humans Since 1982, the Swedish artistic duo of Bastian Bischoff and Per Emanuelsson, created A million Times 135, a kinetic artwork that is constantly in motion in the hotel lobby.

The artists are concerned with the question: “How time designs and how to design time”. This art piece is formed of a grid of clocks where each hand rotates and stops at certain positions to create digits, falling apart every minute, rotating and reforming again. Even though the movement of each clock-hand is simple, as the multiple hands move simultaneously, they create something practical and beautiful.

Dali, the Spanish surrealist artist often used melting clocks to symbolise the time which escapes us while we are asleep. At The Whitby Hotel in the city that never sleeps, we have incorporated a modern day alternative to the very traditional standing grandfather clock. In Maarten Baas’s Real Time: Grandfather Clock, the face shows a shadowy grandfather or ‘Father Time’, through misted glass rubbing out and redrawing the clock hands as each minute passes.

Watch the Grandfather Clock in action in the video below:

A timepiece can give an instant update to your interiors: wall clocks, grandfather clocks and desk clocks are all timely details to our fine-tuned interiors.