Peter Elson meets David Brewitt, chief executive of Hope Street Hotel

A UNIVERSITY film course and cult record shop are responsible for the creation of Liverpool’s first and most successful four-star designer hotel.

This is the paper trail that leads from the arrival of Sheffield-born undergraduate engineering student and later physics teacher David Brewitt to becoming founder and chief executive of the trendy boutique Hope Street Hotel.

This minimalist wonder incorporates the award-winning London Carriage Works Restaurant.

The latter is run by food and beverage director Paul Askew, an early partner in the business with Andrew Bentley, who has since left.

Others like chairman Tony Harvey and creative director Mary Colston have been in it for the long-haul.

There was nothing like it in Liverpool, and it wouldn’t have happened if Brewitt had listened to the legal advice he was given.

Or if Probe Records and the idea of the University of Liverpool’s film course hadn’t lured the brainy young Brewitt across the Pennines.

“But, if I want to do something, I just do it. I have a certain amount of contempt for professionals,” said a smiling Brewitt.

Although he probably wasn’t smiling when, to secure purchase of the AJ Buckingham furniture store in Hope Street, he not only had to buy the property but the firm’s debts, too.

“Well, it seemed the only way to do it and get the building I loved,” he said of the fairly modest-looking Victorian former factory, albeit in a simplified Venetian palazzo style.

However, the 1860 building has scrubbed-up very well in its new 89-room boutique hotel guise.

But as with all transforming visions, guts and instinctive reaction play a huge amount.

Now it is the natural billet for top- echelon travellers like ex-US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Sex and the City star Kim Cattrall, and composer Lord Lloyd Webber.