Hort's Townhouse

Young's & Co. turned a tired Broad Street sports bar back into the 1920s cocktail lounge it once briefly was, adding 19 individually shaped boutique rooms above a lively all-day restaurant and bar. It's the Old City's most characterful pub-hotel hybrid, built inside a building with no prior life as a hotel.

The place

Hort's Townhouse occupies a Grade II-listed 18th-century building at 49 Broad Street, in Bristol's Old City, a few steps from Corn Street and St Nicholas Market.

The concept

The building had never operated as a hotel before: it went from 18th-century warehouse and sales office to a 1920s cocktail bar, then decades as a Berni Inn steakhouse and, more recently, an outdated sports bar with a cinema room. Pub group Young's & Co. brought in brand agency Harrison to strip that back and rebuild the space around its brief but glamorous 1920s identity, adding 19 bedrooms across the first and second floors: the building's first-ever hotel rooms. Because several interior rooms had no windows, the design team cut rooflights to bring in natural daylight, and used space-saving joinery to make the most of an irregular historic footprint.

Each of the 19 rooms is a different shape and size, from compact 'Cosy' rooms to a top-floor Loft, decorated with art deco details, rainfall showers, minibars and espresso machines. It reads less like a standalone hotel and more like a very well-appointed pub with rooms upstairs: a format Young's has run successfully elsewhere, applied here to a heritage Bristol address.

Dining & wellness

The ground floor runs as an all-day pub-restaurant serving British produce-led dishes from breakfast through dinner, plus a 1920s-inspired cocktail bar with matchday bar snacks and screens for live sport (Premier League, Six Nations, Formula 1).