How Samantha Trinder built Bingham Riverhouse into the wellness-focused hotel it is today

Over the 21 years under her management she has built the Bingham Riverhouse into a 15-bedroom hotel focused on rest, wellness, good food and socialising, with a three-AA-rosette restaurant overseen by Steven Edwards, a garden-level wedding and events space and a wellness centre across the road, offering guests yoga and fitness classes, high-tech holistic treatments and complementary therapies. Additionally, a newly-formed members' club offers events, a co-working space and discounts on facilities.

However, Trinder says it would have been difficult to build the Bingham into the luxury brand it is now if starting from scratch today. "In those first few years I doubled the turnover and, based on that, we were able to get a bank loan to refurbish all the rooms," she says. She explains that the Bingham took around £400,000 in revenue when she took over management of the property in 2001, after which she grew takings to £2m following the first refurb.

"It was crazy in those days. We got free government advice and created a business plan and took that to the bank, and they were like ‘here's £1.8m'. Now, after the financial crash, they do a lot more due diligence before shelling out that kind of money. And after Covid, I can't even change my bank account as the banks aren't taking any new hospitality clients because of the uncertainty."

Pre-Covid, the Bingham Riverhouse's revenue hit £3.4m in 2018 and £3.2m in 2019. And luckily Trinder says the hotel has thrived over the past year due to the huge demand for weddings – in eight months in 2021 the property took just over £3m, while forecasts for 2022 are just shy of breaking £4m.

In hindsight, concentrating on weddings and events was a sensible business decision for Trinder, when back in the early 2000s the limited 886m² footprint meant it was a choice between hosting weddings or offering guests a deluxe spa.

"It was a tough decision, I wanted to turn it into a spa with a pool and treatment rooms and it was really tricky to weigh up the pros and cons. But weddings and events are a much easier revenue stream, compared to the level of investment we needed to put in. My heart was in the spa and my head was with weddings."

Nearly 20 years on from the completion of that first refurbishment, which saw the hotel drop from 23 keys to 15, Trinder is now considering developing a pool in the Thames-facing garden, due to the trend for outdoor swimming that has taken off in recent years.

But a much bigger project also lies on the horizon, with plans to double the size of the Bingham. After years of eyeing up a derelict neighbouring property a few doors down, conversations with investors are finally under way. And Trinder doesn't want to stop there, with her dreams of opening a sister property somewhere on the coast and calling it the Bingham Beach House firmly in her mind's eye.

Gut instinct

"After 20 years of mistakes, not trusting my gut and following what everyone else was doing and not listening to myself and what I wanted to do, I finally feel confident again," she says.

Trinder freely admits she "had no clue" what she was doing when running the hotel in her twenties – her dream wasn't even to own a hotel as she had initially considered a career in journalism.

She absorbed a lot from her mother and co-owner of the Bingham Riverhouse, Ruth Trinder. "I was lucky that mum left me pretty much to it. She ran her own nursing home business, and nursing homes are just like hotels – there are beds, breakfast, lunch, dinner for the residents, and chefs. She came from Kenya, from a really poor, humble upbringing, so she was my role model."

Trinder adds: "Working in hospitality is exciting and running your own business has its benefits because you can choose when you want to work. I have two children and a lot of women leave the industry because they have kids, but back in 2005 I had my son and I was breastfeeding in the office. In some ways working in hospitality was good because I could take him to school in the mornings, work a late shift and my partner, at the time, would look after him in the evenings." That said, the responsibility of running the Bingham and looking after 53 full-time employees did catch up with her. "It was a massive responsibility for everyone's livelihoods," she says. "And in 2008 it did get too much for me and I had a mini-breakdown. It happens a lot in hospitality because you have to carry on working when everyone else is off and I worked every weekend for most of my twenties, having only the odd holiday – it's relentless. I didn't know how to manage stress and took everything very personally – if someone complained it was the end of the world for me."

It wasn't until 2013 that Trinder even hired a general manager. "I was pretty much doing it, more or less, by myself," Hiring the GM was a lesson in relinquishing control to some extent, with Trinder worried she wouldn't be taken seriously as the boss being a "young girl at the time". While the successful applicant clearly worked out as he stayed for seven years, she says there was still an element of push back from the wider team and industry about her ideas for the hotel. For instance, following her breakdown, Trinder focused on wellbeing to alleviate her own stress and was keen to introduce elements of this – such as yoga, meditation and healthy eating – into the hotel.

"Being new in the business, not coming from experience and the female mindset, [people] think you're less good than you are, so I would back down and think ‘oh maybe, it's not a very good idea'. I wish I'd trusted my gut instinct earlier… I was always trying to bring wellness into the Bingham, but it wasn't seen as worthwhile in terms of revenue or it wasn't aligned with the brand, but now, finally, it's what people want and it's a massive trend."

The guest spa across the road, Bhuti, opened in 2016, and in the rooms Trinder points out the yoga mat in every wardrobe and the CBD oil by the bedside for guests to use on their pillow to help them sleep. "And no matter how small, we get a bath into every room because bathing is one of the biggest stress relievers," she says.

Each room also features crystals, such as quartz or amethyst, said to induce better health and wellbeing. "I'm very newly into crystals," she admits, rubbing a quartz through her fingers as she speaks. "We have one in each corner of the room and a couple on the coffee table and you feel the energy move through you. We work with this lady who comes in once a month to cleanse them because they absorb bad energy."

The hospitality industry is very ‘white old man', and, to be taken seriously, I was trying to be something else

Trinder admits that when she pushed for wellness 10 or so years ago, she was perhaps ahead of the curve. At the time, guests might not have appreciated crystals in their rooms or been interested in starting their day with sun salutations, but it's clear that she knew wellbeing was going to be big and the frustration of not introducing this earlier still haunts her.

"At the time, and all through my career, you are often not listened to or taken seriously, but I think women have much better ideas – I'm not being sexist, it's intuition. I know it's a real cliché, but a hotel is a home from home and it's our natural instinct as women – and I'm a mother and a Cancerian, so I'm very nurturing – and we know how to create that home."

Still rubbing the quartz in her hand, Trinder says she thinks she was trying to fit the hotel into a certain genre back then. "I also never said I was the owner or the GM or put my face on the website, because I think some people have some weird racial biases, maybe not consciously. The hospitality industry is very ‘white old man', and, to be taken seriously, I was trying to be something else. At the big hotel events I would be a complete anomaly in the room, so I didn't particularly enjoy the industry, but now I'm older, I don't give a shit, to be honest. I think I'm finally getting the confidence not to fit this or that, but trying to be authentic and say this is what we do here."

Single vision

By the time it came to refurbish the hotel once more in 2019, Trinder was ready to truly follow her instincts and launch a members' club model, hiring designer Nicola Harding to modernise the property with light pastels, deep jewel tones and clean lines.

"We weren't sure [a private members' club] would work for us. Obviously everyone has seen the success of places like Soho House, but lockdown gave us the opportunity to test it. And when we opened the workspace in March 2021, straight away we got members signing up before fully reopening in the May. We're trying to make it a house with different rooms rather than a hotel – from an interior design perspective we have flexibility with rooms, so it can be a private dining room one minute then a library workspace the next."

After the devastation of Covid-19, Trinder believes the businesses that have survived are witnessing fierce loyalty from their customers. "We've a very optimistic budget for 2022 and we're working harder in our offering. We'd normally be slammed at the weekend and, unless we had the odd conference, there would be nothing really happening during the week, but with this new model we have people here every day and Monday morning breakfast is now rammed with locals."

Weekend hotel guests seem to blend seamlessly with club members, according to Trinder, and since Covid the hotel has been running full steam ahead. The average room rate has increased by 20% to £240 per night, with room prices ranging from £125 to £525. And the brand has also increased its rates for weddings due to surge in demand.

So it seems the expansion of the Bingham's footprint couldn't come soon enough? "It's really early days," says Trinder, referring to the building she would love to buy, after walking past it to work nearly every day for the last 20 years. "It's just been sitting there, uninhabited for 11 years, but it's on the market for double what it's worth. And it would need 12-18 months for the refurb, but with the negotiations… who knows?" She adds: "We'd have the same marketing and management team but perhaps another receptionist. It would put us at 30 bedrooms, because I remember reading an article saying that a boutique hotel needs to be at least 30 bedrooms, otherwise it's very hard to make it profitable, but we've managed to become profitable because of all the F&B we do."

But a project on this scale would still be a big step for the brand, with a whole host of things that could go wrong. "I wish I could tell my younger self not to worry about making mistakes so much," she says. "I lived in absolute anxiety and fear about getting things wrong on a daily basis. In a recent coaching session I was told that all the most successful people in business have been bankrupt at some point and that's the biggest mistake you can make – and we learn from our mistakes.

"We've had so many complaints at the Bingham over the years, and that's how we've carried on improving, with feedback and taking every constructive complaint as an opportunity for growth – I wasted a lot of years crying in a corner."