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• Sleep Event, London: 24-25 November 2010
• REBEC: 21-22 June 2010
• Hospitality Architecture + Design Conference: Macau, June 2010
• Visit to Belgrade: 2-3 June 2010
• Hotel & Leisure Design & Construction Conference: April 2010

Hotel & Leisure Design & Construction Conference — London April 2010

In April, Patrick Reardon was on the stage at the Hotel & Leisure Design & Construction conference "in conversation with" Theo Constantinides, partner at Gardiner & Theobald.

The topic was "Planning for Efficiency of Hotel and Leisure Design" and their discussion began by emphasising the importance of all parties knowing from the outset what end results they wanted to achieve from the hotel project. Patrick spoke about the benefits, for developers and owners, of working with a specialist architect — whether it is their first hotel or their 100th. An architect who thoroughly understands the hotel design and building process has the capability to cut more quickly through the layers and get the ball rolling. Realising an efficient layout, understanding the relationship between front and back-of-house and knowing how design adds value to the asset and supports operations are all vital skills that a specialist architect brings to a hotel project, he argued.

Agreeing with Patrick's perspective, Theo commented that working with a specialist QS also allows for greater efficiency since after years of experience in costing hotel projects, he or she will quickly know — within certain margins — how much a certain job should cost based on the project's parameters. However, Theo proposed, if it is a new-build "box" hotel following a purely standardised formula for its design and construction, a specialised practitioner might not be necessary since efficiency would be inherent within such a prescriptive brief. On the whole, refurbishment projects are much more complex than new build, he explained, because they involve dealing with a legacy, so developers and operators would be well advised to work with specialist practitioners on these projects. Both Patrick and Theo mentioned that they could name some seriously disadvantaged hotel developments not too far away from where they were sitting that might have benefitted from having a specialist professional team!

They also discussed the procedure for calculating design and construction costs in relation to different hotel categories. It was agreed that it comes down to understanding what room sizes are expected at each star rating. For an architect working on a mid-level property, the objective is to get as many rooms into a hotel as possible. Patrick gave the example of the Travelodge Waterloo, where ReardonSmith has been able to gain 43 additional keys by keeping ceiling heights to a maximum 2350mm in the guestrooms and 2200mm within the corridors, creating space for an additional floor so that a five storey extension could be added to an existing four storey building. The extra revenue generated by these rooms will translate into a substantially greater ROI for the developers, he told the audience.

Patrick and Theo concluded with the idea that it is important for efficiency to be considered from the start to the finish of a hotel's development. A hotel's structural envelope should not be treated as a trophy into which you cannot fit an operable hotel. Architects and QSs need to design and cost hotels to make them work from the inside out.