Our Proposals
Improved Quality Hotel With Facilities For Local Residents & Visitors
The proposal is to retain the frame of the existing building and create a high quality hotel rather than the currently consented budget hotel.
The consented massing will largely be replicated, with the façade aesthetic presented in a style more befitting a purpose-built quality hotel.
The hotel will have 88 rooms over 1st – 7th floors with level access. A manned reception activates the street frontage and provides secure access to a bank of three passenger lifts to serve all levels. This will also help to manage and control any anti social behaviour in the vicinity to the site (unlike the consented budget hotel that would not be manned 24/7).
Active Street Frontages
The remainder of the street frontage to Victoria Street and Strutton Ground comprises a ground floor restaurant space for both public and hotel use, further activating the street frontage to the prominent corner of the plot.
A Design That Responds To Adjoining Blocks
The design takes its cue from the adjacent Artillery Mansions residential block. The strong vertical rhythm of fenestration interlaced with a more subtle horizontal line with the brick palette have been reinterpreted in a more contemporary style.
The activation of the street frontage at ground floor level is fully embraced with the certainty of its use as a function of the hotel operation. The corner is celebrated with curved glazing, and the consistency of quality materials and detailing is repeated on Strutton Ground. The now centrally located primary core also reduces the impact of the lift overrun on Artillery Mansions.
The proposed design seeks to introduce a deliberate expression of the roof at eighth floor with a lighter standing seam metal cladding sitting atop a strongly expressed horizontal parapet. This positively terminates the parapet, separating the facade from the roof whilst correlating to the parapet of Artillery Mansions. It also introduces the classical architectural composition of “bottom / middle / top”.