Ica Architects have designed and developed the new easyHotel in Glasgow. The project is a conversion of a 1960’s office block and is due for completion in February 2012.
The external walls and interior of the building on Cambridge Street Glasgow have been stripped back to the basic concrete beam and slab structure. A new interior and façade will form the works being undertaken by the contractor Thomas Johnston allowing the building to take on a completely new image.
EasyHotel continues the same ethos of the original easyJet brand, giving the customer value and only paying for what they really need. In hotels most guests only want a comfortable bed, a clean room, an en-suite bathroom with a good shower. easyHotel provides and guarantees these basic needs and if customers want more space or a TV these can be purchased separately.
For the designers the easyHotel model allows very efficient use of redundant buildings. The brand allows a small proportion of the rooms to have no windows. This allows awkward corners or deep buildings to be fully utilized keeping costs for the developer and ultimately the guests as low as possible. The rooms without windows are cheaper and are always the first to be booked. Many guests will arrive late and leave early and never benefit from daylight anyway. The windowless room is also a familiar feature of cruise ships.
The proposed easyHotel in Glasgow, represents a genuinely sustainable, commercial and fitting re-use of an existing building within the urban context of the interface between the modern commercial city centre grid-iron of Glasgow and the tenemental scale of Garnethill. The building design unites the pre-fabricated nature of the programme with the scale of the existing urban fabric to create a building as ‘advertisement’ for this global brand.
Hotel development in the UK continues to be one of the stronger performing sectors in this depressed market. Funding in any sector is tough, but the development of hotels in existing buildings can be given a funding boost by the BPRA allowance.
The Building Premises Renovation Allowance (BPRA) is only available in particular areas and will provide valuable tax incentives to investors for the renovation costs of redundant buildings. Ica Architects recently completed the hotel Indigo in Glasgow using the same BPRA based funding model. Several more BPRA hotel projects are planned in Liverpool, Glasgow, Belfast and Birmingham.
The super-budget hotel sector is rapidly evolving and Ica Architects have been working on a number of them throughout the UK. In addition to easyHotel, Ica Architects have been working on other super-budget brands such as Tune and Evolution. Each in their own way seek to identify the priorities of value and service their customers want and to separate themselves from traditional budget brand which generally have been creeping up-market.
Ica Architects are one of the UK’s leading hotel design practices. They provide a wide range of services relating to the development and delivery of hotel projects including the core services of architecture and interior design. Ica have delivered hotels from the luxury sector right through to super-budget, including many of the world’s leading brands and individual boutique hotels. Within Ica there are a number of well balanced teams which ensures that each aspect of the project is undertaken to the level of priority directed by the client. Ica have a specialist heritage and design team who work on demanding design projects in sensitive or high profile locations.
There is also a team who work on more commercial projects which may suit some developers or brands. A specialist interior design team have designed interiors being used throughout the world by the leading brands, but can also undertake a modest upgrade to a bar. Ica’s delivery team undertakes all tender and site work and can make sure the designers’ ideas are realized on site as efficiently as possible.
