The Chequers Inn in the Hope Valley, Derbyshire, is a bustling country pub with rooms, offering fabulous food and drink.

Dating back to the 1700s, the Inn combines the best of traditional and contemporary style applied to both the building and its interiors, and its delicious seasonal dishes which use locally sourced quality produce.

This gave us a great starting point when we were commissioned to rebrand The Chequers Inn and to design and build a new website.

The client felt their existing logo and visual brand was looking dated, and they wanted to attract a wide range of customers, including the many tourists that visited the Peak District village. We applied a new typeface and rich, traditional colours combined with white space around each element of the logo to create a more balanced feel.

The Chequers Inn rely heavily on their website to take bookings and to provide details of upcoming events and special offers, however the technology it was built on was slow and outdated. We designed and built a new website for our client using WordPress, allowing them to make changes easily and regularly so they could promote everything that was coming up.

We designed the new website in a clean style, using simple and intuitive navigation to help visitors find what they need and take actions – like making a booking or finding menus – with ease, resulting in a much improved user experience.

We used the client’s collection of beautiful photographs throughout the site to show off the Inn, its rooms, and dishes and we balanced tradition and contemporary style to show off this fantastic pub with rooms.

We have since applied the new brand to offline materials including bespoke labels for The Chequers Inn’s delicious range of homemade goods.

Jonathan Tindall, owner of the Chequers Inn, said:

“We worked with Grey Matter earlier this year to on a full rebrand and new website for our business. The Grey Matter team understood our brief clearly and came back to us with various options. Full training was given to us to enable us to change content as required. We have been delighted with the results and traffic to our website has increased considerably.

Since then, we have worked with the creative team to design bespoke labelling for our range of homemade produce. Quick, professional and great to deal with. We look forward to using Grey Matter on future projects.”