The 18th Century meets The 21st Century

The team at Conference Roehampton are incredibly excited to have made the decision to use the Google Business Photo service for Parkstead House. This new marketing tool that uses the same technology as Google street maps, enables clients to both view and explore the venue, giving a much better feel than brochures, for what the venue offers.

Philippa & Susan met last week with Kellie Spicknell, a Google Trusted Photographer, to discuss the possibility of creating Business Photos for Parkstead House. Kellie, an experienced photographer, has worked with Google on this new concept on restaurants, shops and children’s play parks such as Hobbledown’s in Epsom.

We took a tour around the site and discussed the various set-ups that we were proposing and Kellie advised us on how many 3600 shots (30) and where were the best places to take them. Our beautiful Cluttons corridor will have five shots taken the length of the corridor displaying the Parkstead archive window display, the Courtyard, the stairwell, and the Burne-Jones windows as well as the corridor itself.

We will take this opportunity to do a bit of a ‘spring clean’ that will include, some painting, cleaning, window-washing and of course, at this time of year, exercising our ‘Billy Goat’!

Philippa Davies, Head of Conferencing Services, said “The great thing about this tool is that the tour opens up Parkstead House to the public, enabling them to see more of a Grade I listed house and its decorative features. The House is not normally open to the general public and throughout the tour the William Chambers’ original ceilings are displayed in their full glory in the first of his residential villas, including one in the catacombs”.

Weather dependent we are planning to shoot the House the week before Christmas and we would like to share this creative journey with you over the next few weeks. Watch this space.............

Wacky Winter Wear comes to Conference Roehampton

The green fingered ladies in the conference office have just returned from their Green Impact team meeting bursting with amusing ideas to raise awareness of environmental issues across campus with today’s focus being heating. I nearly fell of my chair when I found out our annual utilities bill was nearly £1.4 million, but what can our little group do about this we all muttered…“lots” Anna our team leader encouraged us.

After gobbling up Alina’s Jamie Oliver chocolate brownies (with fairtrade chocolate of course) we began to brainstorm. Finally, after lots of giggles, gasps and ‘I am not doing that(‘s)!’ the team decided to join forces with AgeUK who are running a campaign called ‘spread the warmth’ and at Conference Roehampton we intend on doing just that.

The idea is; instead of turning up the thermostat in the office to ward off the cold winter weather everyone has to wear something warm and in our case something fun. We are calling it “wacky winter wear”. It’s a simple idea that I am sure is going to provide lots of laughs. We are going to combine this with a afternoon bake sale to raise some important pennies for AgeUK.

This is the opportunity I have been waiting for to buy a onesie, now I just have to decide if it will be a Spiderman one or an dinosaur… choices, choices, choices! Our Assistant Director pipes up in the meeting that he already has a onesie - “it’s called a wet suit!” as long as it’s warm Tim, I can’t wait to see you rock it!

Don’t you worry there will be plenty of onesie photos coming your way.

Competition Time

It has been a busy few weeks here at Conference Roehampton after making the decision to enter our two fabulous venues Parkstead House and Grove House as well as our wonderful ‘Grove House Fairy Godmother’ Carla Simmons into The 2013 Wedding Industry Awards.

After a grand total of 30 weddings over the past 12 months it seemed like a fantastic opportunity to celebrate the relationships we have built with all of our newlyweds, and relationships we have certainly built! The support we have received from all our couples from the past twelve months has been fantastic and after realising that our emails were not spam(!) our Brides and Grooms came on board and we are so grateful that they all took the time to give us their vote.

As all of our 30 couples approach their first Christmas as Mr & Mrs we would like to say for one final time “congratulations and we are so glad you chose to create such happy and important memories at our historical venues”. A big thank you also from our Grove House Fairy Godmother Carla Simmons and her little pumpkin. It was lovely to see that you think she is as brilliant as we do!

Watch this space for more news on how we do in the awards. Forget ‘Battle of the Bands’ its all about ‘Battle of the Venues’ as our sister sites Grove House & Parkstead House go head to head!