STAYING POWER

Manser Practice has been building hotels for 20 years, its work charting the changes to the UK hotel industry. Simplicity and the creation of spaces that are both homely and exotic have been key to their longevity

Words Pamela Buxton

‘Our architecture isn’t fashionable enough for the press. They’re honest, good, straightforward buildings which are a pleasure to be in. They are users’ buildings rather than architects’ buildings,’ says Jonathan Manser of Manser Practice. Well, that’s telling us. 

And yet the 397-bed Sterling Hotel at Heathrow Terminal 4 that started the practice on the hotel trail 20 years ago attracted both press publicity and awards – its dramatic five-storey atrium was a show-stopper, winning the Royal Fine Arts Commission/Sunday Times building of the year prize and an RIBA Award.

The firm, founded in 1960 by RIBA president to be Michael Manser, had never built a hotel before but since that practice-defining project has gone on to work on 16 more major projects, completing eight and with another six on the go, including the 397-bed Wembley Hilton.

Together, these projects demonstrate the changing nature of the UK hotel industry, from the shift in client base – developers these days rather than hoteliers – through to the rapid growth of the budget hotel and new concepts such as Yotel. It’s been a boom industry since 2003 and even now it’s estimated that 40,000 new hotel rooms will be built in the country between 2010-2015.

It’s likely a fair number of these will be designed by Manser Practice. It’s not that the firm only designs hotels – it has a particular expertise in overseas embassies as well as a track record in houses, offices and transport – but the sector does account for nearly a third of its projects and some 60-70% of project income. The challenges of the building type certainly appeal to Jonathan, who now runs the practice his father founded.

‘It’s difficult but more interesting, too,’  he says, comparing the logistics of hotels to much simpler propositions such as city trading floors. ‘Combining efficient hotel bedroom planning with really exciting public spaces and a hotel people want to go into and remember afterwards [is a challenge]… A good hotel should feel exotic and homely at the same time.’

Despite the complexities of hotels, the practice prides itself on a simplicity of approach. What’s important, says Manser, is that the buildings are economic in use of materials and cost, work properly and are above all enjoyable to use. It’s pretty no-nonsense stuff, with absolutely no time for what Manser refers to as ‘whimsy’.

For all that, when the practice built the £23m Sterling (now Hilton) Hotel 20 years ago, its theatrical public spaces were a world away from other UK airport hotels, which at the time, says Manser, often resembled prisons. That could never be said of the Sterling – its dramatic glazed entrance and expressed structure give the building a sense of grandeur and generous space. Views across the atrium space to the bar, restaurants and lifts mean guests can orientate themselves immediately, with half the bedrooms overlooking this main space. The arrangement allowed a smaller footprint and significantly reduced costs. It was also pragmatic – with unpromising external views, the architect made the most of the hotel interior instead.

‘The point was that it had a shop window. It only had one entrance and you could see all the public spaces from the bridges,’ says Manser. ‘It was dramatic and exciting to go into but wasn’t threatening…You need to be at home and comfortable without feeling intimidated by an unusual space.’

The early 1990s recession put paid to several hotel projects that the practice had won on the back of the Sterling, and the firm shrank to just five people from 40 (it is back up to 35 today). As things improved it designed Southampton Airport in 1994, but it wasn’t until 2004 that it was back in the airport hotel market, completing the 233-bed, £21m Gatwick Hilton extension.

The budget hotel sector has also helped the practice to thrive. This sector has increased at a faster rate than any other hotel type, representing 55% of all new hotel rooms since 2003. One of the country’s biggest chains is Travelodge, which last month announced plans for another 26 hotels in the UK. Manser Practice was in on the trend early, designing the Docklands Travelodge back in the mid 1990s – a straightforward building that made use of prefabricated building techniques.

It also got involved with the Yotel chain created by the team behind the Yo!Sushi brand. The idea was to create compact, prefabricated flat-pack room pods without windows that could be put into any site. Several practices, including Priestman Goode which developed a room design, had already been involved before Manser Practice came on board. Three room types were eventually developed – premium, standard and economy – and the practice built the first two at Heathrow T4, Gatwick South Airport Terminal and Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport in 2009. Manser Practice is no longer involved with Yotel but is still exploring the potential of pre-fab for hotels and is talking to a developer about building small-scale luxury hotel accommodation at several sites in London.

Yotel exemplifies the trend over the last decade for brand-led concepts in hospitality ranging from boutique to pod. The firm also worked with Virgin on an unbuilt concept room for a new Virgin hotel chain. The idea was that the room referenced the moulded aesthetic of the inside of a plane but also rethought the basic hotel room. On entry, the guest sees the mini-bar first with the sink and toilet situated to one side and a wetroom on the other, with the bedroom straight ahead. Instead of a bulky, unnecessary wardrobe, there is simply a rail tucked behind the bed. At the other end is a desk with a rotating flat screen. The idea was scuppered by the recession. Another unrealised venture was the dubious concept of luxury hotel accommodation at Bluewater shopping centre. Manser came up with an atrium hotel scheme but it went nowhere.

Manser Practice has had better success with space-constrained city-centre hotels. One of its best projects, according to Manser – and, it should be said, the architectural press, too – was the £65m refurbishment and extension of the Great Eastern Hotel at Liverpool Street, which completed in 2000. This was a hugely complex project, involving the internal reworking of a run-down grade II-listed building to accommodate a nine-storey extension. One of the main challenges was dealing with the dysfunctional circulation – before the refurb, it was impossible to reach the top of the six-storey building in a single lift or stair journey. Working on entry principles similar to the Heathrow Hilton, Manser’s design channelled guests through one door to a top-lit atrium where they could immediately orientate themselves to main elements such as the front desk and lifts. Bedroom numbers increased from 140-267. The practice is now working on the major, but still confidential, refurbishment of a hotel in London’s Mayfair.

Two of Manser’s latest hotels demonstrate the complete shift in client base within the industry since the T4 hotel. Park Inn, completed last summer in Manchester, and Wembley Hilton, now at planning stage, are both for developer clients as part of broader mixed-use schemes. Manser identifies this as a major trend of the last few decades in the sector – the big hotel chains dominant in the 1960s, 70s and 80s no longer own and develop hotels in a recognised format, rather having a management agreement or lease with a developer.

‘Developers now need a development profit and funding becomes more complicated. So there’s a move to mixed-use development where funding can be secured in smaller packages,’ says Manser, adding that this creates more opportunities for good commercial practices to get involved in hotels.

Park Inn, situated on the edge of Manchester city centre, was designed for CityPark. This developer took on the project from Development Securities which commissioned Manser Practice to design the nearby CityPark office building. The practice’s interior design division, set up three years ago, created the interiors for the 250-bed hotel.

It’s a rather severe, monolithic structure, with strictly regimented windows – Manser particular dislikes vogueish asymmetrical window arrangements which will date buildings firmly in the early 21st century. Apart from a couple of projecting windows, the same can be said of the 400-bed Wembley Hilton which the practice is designing for Quintain. Clad in black ceramic granite atop ground floor retail units, it has only a small corner of ground floor to make an impact. The architects plan a dramatic 9m-high entrance lobby with an escalator up to the first floor restaurant.

‘By day it will be a shining black triangle. By night, the lights of the windows will shine,’ says Manser, who hopes the hotel will start on site in early 2011.
With the London 2012 Olympics looming, a continued surge of activity is expected by the British Hospitality Association as hotels rush to get accommodation ready in time.

But beyond that, what lies ahead for the sector? New concepts come and go but hotels will always boil down to good planning and simple, comfortable rooms, says Manser.

He predicts scope for ‘more interesting and exciting’ design as a result of the trend for hotels to be part of mixed-use schemes rather than built in isolation. Certainly, despite its established hotel pedigree, the firm doesn’t by any means expect to have things all its own way.

‘That trend has opened the whole process to a much wider range of designers,’ Manser says. ‘It means there’s more competition. It may not be good for us personally, but it is good for the hotel industry generally.’