Heartwood Collection aims to open 'up to 200' bedrooms in 2024

Heartwood Collection has revealed plans to open up to 200 bedrooms in its pubs over the next year despite its team having "very little experience" in the overnight accommodation sector.

It comes after the group, formerly known as Brasserie Bar Co, announced its aim to grow to up to 60 pubs with up to 500 bedrooms by 2027.

Heartwood Collection acquired its first pub with rooms earlier this month. The White Horse in Dorking, Surrey, is a 56-room, Grade II-listed property considered to be one of England’s oldest coaching inns and is referenced in the works of both Jane Austen and Charles Dickens.

The business currently operates 20 Heartwood Inns pubs and 14 Brasserie Blanc restaurants across the UK.

Mark Derry, executive chairman at Heartwood Collection, told the Casual Dining Show in London: “In the next year we are modestly going to open 150, possibly 200 bedrooms. We’ve never done it before, so we have hired a lot of consultants to help us.

“Internally, we have very little experience. But it will be a huge benefit to the business and a very profitable part to it if successful. We’re doing it really carefully, but we can’t throw every resource to it because we’ve got a £70m business we need to protect.”

He said it would be a priority for the business to develop staff who could manage pubs and rooms and encourage those team members to progress through the company.

Brasserie Bar Co was founded by chef Raymond Blanc and Derry and was acquired by Alchemy Partners in early 2022.

It rebranded as Heartwood Collection earlier this year and secured £100m funding with the ambition to expand in the premium pub sector, which Derry said the group would spend “in the next 18 months”.

He said the focus had been on acquiring freehold pubs because it “offers security to the business”.

“If you run a leasehold site, if it goes pomp, you’re gone," said Derry. "You lose everything. If you have a freehold, if in your format it doesn’t work, it may well work in somebody else’s, so you have an asset you can sell. It’s more appealing to a bigger market in terms of exit opportunities."

Earlier this month, Heartwood Collection announced it had acquired two new freehold pubs, the Plough and Harrow in Long Ditton, south-west London, and the Crown in the cathedral city of Lichfield, as part of its ongoing expansion plans that will increasingly be targeted towards Birmingham and the south of England.

Derry said the company had a good track record of staff retention, adding: “We have a very sticky group of people. The average tenure for regional service is 13 years as head chef, seven years as general manager, and four years in head office.

"100% of the people in the business have a career pathway. If they have aspirations to move up, they can, and those things combined, you end up with a group of people who really want to make it work.”