Acorn Creative helps create an amazing spa experience…

Dormy House is a beautiful hotel and spa perched high above the equally beautiful Cotswold Village of Broadway. Dormy House casts itself, with every justification, as a perfect retreat, with cosy corners, log fires, wonderful food, and sumptuous interiors. The hotel is also famed for its sparkling spa experiences.

‘Experiences’ have a life of their own once somebody had indulged in them. Word of them travels from person to person, and always has of course, but these days social networks help news travel even faster and more colourfully aided by video and pictures. A recently commissioned new spa experience at Dormy House is likely to be much discussed on social media and more widely. It’s not every day that one can experience real snow falling indoors while surrounded by snow-bound woodlands. 

Dormy House approached Acorn Creative, based near Evesham, to help it deliver the notable experience. The Acorn team’s role in building the experience involved close consultation from the point of conception and onward to designing and provisioning the graphics that actually deliver much of the sensation and effect. 

No instruction manual or prescription exists for creating snow-bound indoor spa enclosures and so much experimentation was involved in making the idea as conceived actually work. 

The ‘snow’ that falls on the occupiers of the built environment is just that - it’s real snow and it falls in flakes into the environment below. The environment itself is held around ambient temperature so once the falling snow has done its job, it melts away without a trace - it has to be experienced.

The room, or environment, was fabricated from ten millimetre thick clear acrylic to support a backlighting scheme for the walls that effectively washes backlight from the top and bottom of the walls. The walls’ surfaces are covered in a mural depicting snow bound forest scenery. 

The team at Acorn Creative leveraged its experience in dealing with the mural’s imagery to ensure that the strongly vertical trees that feature didn’t converge with height. That avoids trees impinging on an adjacent wall surface and makes the whole effect more convincing still. 

Metamark MD5-A and its matching Matt Laminate MG-702 were used for the mural elements of the job, printed on a Roland TruVis. The MD5-A applied effortlessly and the effect, that’s to the uniform facefilm quality and the transparency of the ink, was preferred over more translucent films including etch effects. 

Acorn Creative’s work is innovative, deeply creative and sure to star widely on social media and, on that subject, more from Acorn Creative can be found on Instagram - here. Be sure to tag us in if you share.