I was on site at the Boathouse in Swanwick last week, checking a furniture update, when I found myself overhearing a conversation on the table next to mine. Two women were having lunch on the decking, looking out over the marina.

“Look at this,” one said, surprised. “It’s like being at the RHS. It’s quite… girly!”

“Yes,” her friend said. “But without being obviously so.”

“I thought when you said ‘The Boathouse’ it wouldn’t be like this.”

“Ahh! Yes. I love it here. The inside’s great too.”

I couldn’t resist stopping to say hello. “Great loos too,” the second friend added happily, once I’d explained my interest. She may have meant this as a pleasing aside, but it meant more to me than that. We push for the same level of care in every WC that we design for a hospitality client, accessible ones included. These facilities are easy to under-resource, but nearly everyone needs to use them at some point and we approach all WCs as integral to a guest’s experience.

It’s rare to hear a genuine, unsolicited reaction to a space you’ve designed, and rarer still to hear an assumption overturned mid-sentence. Whatever “The Boathouse” conjured for that first friend, this wasn’t it. The planting on the terrace has been given real care: dense enough to soften the hard edges of the decking without crowding the view, and it does something important to the mood of the place that the name, built around the storage and maintenance of boats, doesn’t prepare you for.

It made me think about how much of designing an interior is a quiet negotiation with expectation. Sometimes that’s deliberate: with commercial clients we talk explicitly about who a space needs to appeal to, and we’ll bring in outside perspectives if the room’s decision-makers skew too far in one direction. Sometimes it’s less conscious and comes into focus only later, in a comment overheard from the next table.

Either way, it’s a useful reminder that the people using a space rarely arrive with a blank slate. They bring a name, a reputation, a half-formed picture of what they’re walking into, and the room either meets that picture or quietly argues with it. The Boathouse at Swanwick, it turns out, argues well.