Design and Build, Hotel Mock Up Rooms, Kensington and Chelsea

Spectra were appointed to design and build two mock up hotel rooms in Kensington and Chelsea, created to inform the full refurbishment of an operational London hotel. The client's design team had taken the scheme to RIBA Stage 2. Spectra completed the remaining design and delivered both rooms in full, from soft strip through to a finished, useable hotel room.

The hotel stayed open throughout, and the brief was that neither guests nor staff should be affected by the works. Low noise and low vibration equipment was used as a result, which mattered because the building is a reinforced concrete frame with no false ceilings, so noise and vibration carry straight into the occupied rooms around it. With the public lifts unavailable, every material was handballed up the stairs from basement level to the eighth and eleventh floors.

Mould found during the soft strip was treated, betterment was delivered to the fire compartmentation of each room, and M&E anomalies arising from the age of the building were put right, bringing the installation up to current requirements. With the client's designers based in Singapore, Spectra closed the scope gaps left in the Stage 2 design and sourced local alternatives where specified products were impractical to obtain or to maintain, in design dialogue with hotel management and the design team at least twice daily. Where furniture manufactured by the hotel proved too large for the rooms, Spectra re-manufactured it rather than let the programme stall.

Both rooms were completed in three weeks, with the hotel trading normally throughout. The client has adopted them as the basis for the wider refurbishment of the hotel and as the benchmark for the quality expected across the rest of the scheme.