The Stonegate Pub Company has acquired the 13 sites of the Living Room estate from Premium Bars & Restaurants(Orchid). The deal values the Living Room estate at around £10m. This transaction is in addition to the recent acquisitions of The Queens Head in Frodsham, Cheshire and a new larger site for the Slug & Lettuce brand in the O2 Greenwich arena.
Stonegate chief executive Toby Smith said: “We are delighted to have acquired The Living Room business and are looking forward to working with the current team to operate what are undoubtedly some of the finest sites in the UK.”
There has been speculation that Stonegate may look to convert some of the sites to its Slug & Lettuce brand, which the company is looking to double in size after three years of consecutive double-digit sales growth. The Living Room estate is understood to have been trading well in the past year. It has been managed by Eclectic since August last year and before that it was run by Orchid Pub Company.
The Living Room estate includes sites in London, Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Bristol. The brand was founded by Tim Bacon in 1999 and was bought by Ultimate Leisure in 2007 for £28m. Stonegate Pub Company is the largest privately held managed pub operator in the UK with revenues approaching half a billion pounds and employs over 10,500 people. The company has 573 pubs which are split into the following segments: Classic Inns, Local Pubs, Great Traditional Pubs, Slug & Lettuce, Scream, Yates’s, Bars & Venues and Missoula.
