“It was early January 2021, and it was nonetheless very a lot a constructing website,” chef Nicholas Balfe recollects of his first website go to to what’s now Holm, his restaurant with just-opened rooms within the village of South Petherton. “We had been guided across the empty shell while carrying pink laborious hats and pink high-vis.”

A former NatWest financial institution (the again finish of the village money machine stays curtained off within the eating room), this good-looking, honey-colored constructing was initially inbuilt 1830 for a rich service provider. “What’s now the backyard was only a mass of rubble and dirt,” Nicholas says. “The previous Nineteen Sixties concrete financial institution vault sat like an infinite cuboid abscess the place our terrace is now.”

Choosing their manner via the rubble, Nicholas and the crew of builders and designers made their option to the positioning workplace. “We sat upstairs huddled round a conveyable heater with a flask of tea and a picnic basket full with sourdough bread, heat venison sausages, and a spherical of Baron Bigod,” he says. “As website visits go, it wasn’t too unhealthy!”

The restaurant opened in 2021 and is Nicholas’s fourth creation. (He opened Salon, Levan, and Larry’s in south London earlier than shifting to rural Somerset.) The positioning has develop into a hub for locals while drawing diners from additional afield eager to expertise the clear flavors and seasonal, ingredient-led dishes Nicholas has develop into recognized for.

It made sense, then, for the restaurant to return with rooms. Let’s take a look:

Within the 34-cover restaurant, hard-at-work cooks (minus their pink laborious hats) are busy within the open kitchen. Punters can pull up a stool right here or take their pre-dinner drink to the seating space in entrance of the wood-burning range which separates the kitchen from the primary eating space. Right here, lime plaster partitions, English oak joinery, and uncovered brickwork mix to create an environment that’s uncooked but heat and welcoming. “We needed to create an area that felt minimalist and up to date while nonetheless being firmly rooted within the historical past of the constructing,” Nicholas explains. “That precept was the guiding issue for the aesthetic within the rooms, too. Our purpose was to spotlight authentic architectural options the place attainable and create clear, sharp, design-led particulars the place we added new parts.”