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The Gilpin Hotel & Lake House

A bespoke AI-powered staff training portal built for one of England's finest country house hotels — a Relais & Châteaux and Pride of Britain member, with two properties in the Lake District.

SectorHospitality

TypeAI Integration & Web App

LocationWindermere, Lake District

StatusLive — all staff

gilpin.layered.studio / staff portal

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Welcome to the team

Hello, Sarah

Everything you need to grow, learn, and thrive at Gilpin — right here.

Where would you like to go?

Our Hotel

History & what makes us one of England's finest.

SOPs

Procedures, standards & operational guides.

Restaurants

SOURCE, Gilpin Spice & Lake House dining.

Ask Plato

AI trainer — ask anything, 24/7.

The Brief

Paper-based training for a five-star hotel wasn't working.

The Gilpin Hotel & Lake House is one of England's most celebrated independent hotels — a Relais & Châteaux property with two distinct venues, multiple restaurants, and a team of staff spanning front-of-house, food and beverage, housekeeping, and management.

Staff training was largely paper-based and inconsistent. New team members received printed induction packs that were quickly outdated. SOPs lived in binders. Institutional knowledge walked out the door when staff moved on. There was no central, accessible source of truth about how Gilpin operates.

The brief: build a digital staff training hub — one that any member of the team could access from any device, that kept all knowledge centralised and up-to-date, and that made onboarding faster and more consistent across every department.

And with the emergence of capable AI, one additional ask: could the system answer questions in real time, drawing on Gilpin's own knowledge base?

The AI System

Meet Plato — Gilpin's AI trainer.

Plato is a custom AI assistant built specifically for the Gilpin team. It's trained on the hotel's own internal documentation — SOPs, menus, brand standards, property guides, and operational manuals — and can answer any question a staff member might have, instantly and accurately.

What Plato can do

"What's the allergen information for tonight's amuse-bouche?"
"What's our dog policy at Lake House?"
"How do I process a late checkout?"

Questions that used to mean tracking down a manager, hunting through a binder, or guessing — Plato answers in seconds, with accuracy grounded in Gilpin's own documents. It doesn't make things up, and it knows when to refer staff to a senior team member.

Answers questions using Gilpin's actual SOPs and guides

Trained on menus, allergen info, and restaurant procedures

Covers both Gilpin Hotel and Lake House properties

Knows when to escalate to a human — doesn't overstep

Accessible from any device, at any time, from anywhere on property

Knowledge base updated as menus, policies, and procedures change

What We Built

A complete staff training platform — not an off-the-shelf tool.

Staff Home Portal

A personalised dashboard for every team member — their progress, their weeks with Gilpin, and a full navigation hub for all training content, SOPs, and resources, designed to feel like home on day one.

SOP Library

A structured, searchable library of all Gilpin's standard operating procedures — organised by department, regularly updated, and always accessible. Staff can read, search, and bookmark procedures from any device.

Plato AI Chat

A dedicated AI chat interface powered by the Plato system — trained on Gilpin's internal knowledge base and able to answer practical operational questions in plain English, around the clock.

Progress Tracking

Staff can track their learning journey — time with the company, modules completed, and the Peak Performance development pathway. Managers can view team-wide progress through the admin dashboard.

Admin Dashboard

A full management interface for the Gilpin team to add and update content, manage staff accounts, monitor activity, and update the AI knowledge base as the business evolves.

Hotel & Brand Knowledge

Dedicated sections covering the history of Gilpin, the Cunliffe family, Relais & Châteaux and Pride of Britain membership standards, both properties and their spas, all four restaurant concepts, and the GILPIN values.

Design Direction

Luxury-grade design for the people who deliver the luxury.

The Gilpin brand is built on warmth, quality, and understated elegance. The staff portal needed to feel like a natural extension of that — not a generic HR software tool bolted onto their world.

The dark theme with a dot-pattern background creates a sense of depth and quality. The Gilpin gold — #C46A3A — is used sparingly as an accent throughout. Playfair Display italic in the hero echoes the serif typefaces used across the Gilpin marketing site.

Real hotel photography is used throughout — the hero pulls directly from the Gilpin marketing site, so it always reflects the property as it actually looks.

Python / Flask PostgreSQL OpenAI API Playfair Display Inter Gold #C46A3A Dark theme Cloudflare Employment Hero API Knack DB

Brand colours

#070707

#C46A3A

#D68255

Gold / 15%

Type specimen

Hello, Sarah

Playfair Display 600 italic · Hero
Inter 400 · Body & UI

The Outcome

Training that travels with the team.

24/7

Plato AI availability

100%

Staff on the platform

Properties covered

∞

SOPs, always up to date

Every member of the Gilpin team — across both the Hotel and Lake House — uses the platform daily. New starters can onboard faster, experienced staff can look up procedures without interrupting managers, and Plato handles the questions that used to mean tracking someone down in a busy service.

The knowledge base updates as the business evolves: new menus, new team members, new procedures — all reflected in Plato's answers within hours, not weeks.