PRIVATE PLAINS
HOSPITALITY PROJECTS
Fifty one safari style lodges sit scattered across the grounds of Chester Zoo, forming The Reserve, alongside a lakeside terrace and a communal Welcome Lodge housing the Tsavo Lounge and Amboseli Restaurant. The brief for Jolie Studio was to give guests a short break that felt genuinely apart from the everyday, without losing sight of where they were staying. The result draws its language directly from the open African savannah, translated into a UK setting through organic textures, earthy tones and materials chosen for how they age and weather rather than how they photograph on day one.
Each lodge is built around a single idea, that privacy and immersion can sit together rather than compete. Expansive windows and open air terraces put giraffes and grazing wildlife within view of the bed, while the interiors stay deliberately restrained so the landscape outside does the talking.
Timber runs underfoot throughout, left with enough grain and knot visible to read as genuinely sourced rather than dressed up, and its warmth is picked up by soft, ambient lighting that avoids anything overhead or clinical. Marble surfaces appear sparingly, their veining left exposed rather than polished flat, giving the stone the same unforced quality as the wood around it.
Fabrics carry much of the sensory weight. Textured weaves in ochre, clay and sand tones line the seating and headboards, chosen for how they feel underhand as much as how they read from across the room, a detail that matters when a guest is meant to slow down rather than simply pass through.
Furnishings sit slightly elevated off the ground, a quiet nod to the safari lodges the project takes its cue from, and every material was sourced with sustainability treated as a design constraint rather than an afterthought, timbers ethically certified, finishes chosen for longevity over spectacle.
The Welcome Lodge extends the same restraint into a more social setting. The Tsavo Lounge and Amboseli Restaurant share the material language of the individual lodges rather than stepping into anything more formal, so the shift from private stay to communal space feels seamless rather than staged. Guests move between the two without the interior ever raising its voice.
What makes The Reserve work as a piece of private world design is its refusal to perform. There is no attempt to recreate a safari lodge as spectacle. Instead, Jolie Studio has built an environment where the wildlife outside the window is the event, and everything indoors, from the ambient lighting to the grain of the timber floor, exists to support that quiet act of looking rather than to distract from it. It is hospitality built for retreat rather than display, proof that a short break within a conservation zoo can feel as intimate and self contained as any private residence.
