Birch, a property perched just north of the M25 in Hertfordshire, opened in 2020. It bills itself as a festival, a riot, an irresistible escape. Last October the Sunday Times awarded it hotel of the year. An unusual year demanded an unusual pick: an affordable, aesthetically exciting hotel bursting with activities but without any sense of expectation or schedule, on the doorstep of the capital.

Birch isn’t just a hotel. It is also a members’ club with coworking spaces. If this sounds a lot like an Ace Hotel, you won’t be surprised to learn that the former managing director of the Ace Hotel London, Chris Penn, is a co-founder of Birch. A property that can legibly function in several different ways at the same time, make those different drives and needs productive rather than conflicted, is exciting.

From the first moment I saw Birch’s ads online – long before a single review had been penned – I yearned to visit. It wasn’t even clear to me from those adverts what Birch was about, just that it was interesting. I was instantly curious.

After a tumultuous stop-and-start pandemic year-plus, Birch reopened on 17 May of this year, as it turns out right about a week after I was fully vaccinated and able to contemplate lots of things I’d kept away from for ages – public transit, the gym, physical therapy, a professional haircut. Two nights at Birch, which I booked for £120 per night back in mid-March, eyeing my COVID vaccination/immunity timeline, would feel symbolic – a tiny, personal victory.

It did, and I’m glad I went. But unfortunately it has to be said that currently at any rate Birch is a mess. The two big issues are understaffing and lack of organization, or, perhaps more precisely, lack of coordination. This is an understaffed, uncoordinated property, and although it is tempting to discount these problems because the place is otherwise so exciting, the sheer on-the-ground hassles these deficits engender make it impossible to do so.

•••

On the highly anticipated day, I took an Overground train from Liverpool Street station up through northeast London to Theobald’s Grove, just barely beyond the Greater London boundary. I arrived in late afternoon, in a great mood; it was warm and I decided to walk. (Note: Don’t walk to Birch. I had to clomp through grasses and weeds along the very busy A10 to get to Birch.)

After this mildly stressful journey, the last bit of the walk was lovely – long tunnels of trees, a quiet road, and beyond it: the property itself, a listed brick country house that dates to the 18th century. I began to breathe more deeply.

My check-in was full of stops and starts. Three employees were required to figure it out. But I got my room, in an ancillary building. A receptionist – called a ‘placemaker’ – led me through a busy co-working space, alongside an elegant bar, to a lift. One floor up I found my room – minimalist, a carpet solid to the step, deserty early 1990s tones, and plenty of space. I washed my hands, drank a cup of tap water, and lay down on the bed. This, I thought, will do.

Not five minutes later my mobile rang. It was the reception. I had been given the wrong room. They wanted to give me a VIP room and a free cocktail as compensation. No problem. Someone came to fetch me and we walked back to the main house. I proceeded up a boldly painted staircase to my bedroom. It was fine, but I immediately missed the previous room – this one had wonderfully high ceilings but the bathroom felt cheap and barely refurbished; its odd pink walls failing to give the dated finishings a boost of any kind.

The design of the main house is wild, and, it has to be said, extremely appealing – some walls left in a patchy state; other bits painted brightly; décor consists of tapestries, framed drawings, and vases of dried flowers. If you had very quirky, very rich friends whose lives were about large-scale conceptual projects, this is what their house might look like. The style imprint is sophisticated and fun, allowing the building to stand as an imperfect and patchworked entity, the physical building itself retained and upcycled in different ways. If I had to guess I’d say that this mix-and-match style, maximalism interspersed with sparseness, ornamentation interwoven with raw, distressed structure, is something we will be seeing a lot of over the next few years. (For those tracking these things, Red Deer are responsible for Birch’s interiors.)

Indoors, people type away on laptops and drink wine at lunch. Outside, there’s a lot of play. The massive lawn in the back lawn is dotted with chairs and tables and little fire pits and people run around with their dogs. The lido has vibrant murals and fun tiling. There are hipster parents with their babies and older couples, too. It’s informal, stylish. The property spills in every direction. It was exciting, frankly, all this activity, all this buzz. Who was a hotel guest? Who was a member, using the space to work? No idea. I liked that. As far as I can tell, this sort of liminal play is precisely the atmosphere Birch are after. They produce it successfully.

Dinner at Birch’s signature restaurant, the Zebra Riding Club was very good, though it was a little bit annoying that outdoor dining was not an option, especially in light of the explicit billing of the restaurant as an ‘indoor/outdoor’ space on the Birch website. I had to remind myself that I’ve been fully vaccinated – the past 15 months have made the prospect of sitting indoors at a restaurant seem extraordinarily risky and important to avoid. I sat down at the bar, next to an open door, the best available option.

The butter came in a little dish with a spread of miso made from old bread – salty, comforting umami I would have spooned directly into my mouth without even the slightest encouragement; the standard starter, a spicy little soup of grains and peas, was moreish; my lobster course was delightful. It’s a set menu, so the following night I had the vegetarian version, which was also very good. The pacing was slow on the first night but I was having a lovely meal and didn’t mind; by the second night, however, the 30-minute breaks between courses felt slightly annoying.

At night I went back to my room and watched the light sky slowly fade. It was just a few weeks from the solstice. This is a magical time to be in this part of the world, and the occasional soft ripple of laughter or conversation from the lawn below gave me the delicious sensation of being connected yet alone.

I awoke just past four in the morning, the sky already light, the hum of the M25 – a ten-minute walk from the property in a direct line – electric. Why is it that we hear busy motorways especially clearly in the middle of the night? I fell back asleep, spent an hour trying to get myself breakfast – about which more, in a minute – and then took a nap. The bed was extraordinarily comfortable. Later that afternoon, after a walk along the New River path, I took yet another nap, waking up only after the dj below started to play some slow r&b. I can’t remember the last time I took two naps in a single day. That bed was a dream.

•••

Breakfast both mornings was at Valeries, an all-day restaurant. It was unclear where guests should wait for a table. Were we in the way? Waitstaff zip around, overworked. I finally got someone’s attention and asked for a table outside and had to wait a while. I was asked if I wanted to come back in an hour, which of course I did not want to do. It was morning and I was starving. It was 45 minutes before I was seated and another 15 before my breakfast arrived. At the next table, a father with three kids complained to a waiter; he understood the staffing issue but it had been an hour since he had ordered. On the other side of me, a mother with two daughters was given somebody else’s order. Behind me a woman working away on her laptop reminded a waiter that it had been 45 minutes since she had ordered her flat white. My breakfast came relatively quickly, comparatively. It was comped, with effusive apologies.

The next morning at Valeries was even worse; the ordering tablet malfunctioned and ate up my coffee order, which arrived after I had finished my breakfast. It took 90 minutes to get breakfast, which meant that I checked out late and ended up getting to my Golders Green lunch appointment 20 minutes late.

Even ordering an afternoon beer to enjoy in the garden the previous afternoon took 15 minutes; there was a problem with the draught but this wasn’t communicated, so I just stood there, limply, wondering why nobody was cluing me in, along with five or six other people, all of whom had already paid for their drinks and snacks, everyone waiting.

It was clear that there simply are not enough people working at Birch. I spoke to several staff members and they all confirmed this as the main issue. All were apologetic, personable, and overworked.

I am quite sure that the problems at Birch are not just about wait times, that they go deeper than understaffing. I have stayed in enough hotels at a range of price points to recognise structural problems. There is zero coordination where there should be. Here’s one example. At the moment the Wellness Centre has nobody to give massages or other treatments on Tuesdays or Wednesdays – those staffing issues, again – yet, clearly not knowing this, one placemaker told me I should stop by on a Wednesday to see if there had been a cancellation. In a well-run hotel, there should be daily briefings. If there is nobody working at the wellness centre two days of the week, everyone at the hotel should know this. Here are some other issues that go beyond staffing, to recap – ill-thought out spaces (waiter inattention; a lack of places to wait to be seated at the Valeries restaurant; lack of knowledge shared between staff members), poorly functioning software (the tablets used for ordering at Valeries seem to crash a lot); even the absence of a dedicated cab service for people arriving by train.

I haven’t mentioned a bunch of other glitches because I don’t want to get individual Birch employees in trouble for things that were clearly beyond their control.

•••

If I want to be fully uncharitable about it, Birch is comparable to Boris Johnson – the man/hotel full of bluster, bang, pop, flash – he with words and rhetorical machinations; Birch with stylish objects. The comparison only goes so far – if Birch is anything, it is cool; Johnson is not. Birch, like the post-Brexit Britain for which Johnson should be forced to take responsibility, is plagued with staffing issues. Plainly, the EU labour pool this country was able to count on for 15+ years is no longer available. The double-whammy of Brexit and the pandemic explain Birch’s staffing deficit.

I am sympathetic to Birch and its employees. Brexit is a disaster for hospitality and the stops and starts of openings have surely been murder for planning. But the upshot is that the fun chaos of Birch is crowded out by the unfun chaos of its execution. Said a different way, style is never enough.

I want Birch to get it together. I want to like it, to return, to rely on it as an easy escape, to share it with friends. But in its current state I can’t do any of those things.

There are rumours that there are more Birches in the works. I hope the owners will deal with these fundamental issues now, before expansion. Hire more staff, hire an old school hotel manager who knows how to establish structure, and give staff better direction. This place should shine.