Dexter Moren Associates (DMA) has won planning permission to extend the Mercure London Bloomsbury Hotel, increasing the number of guest rooms from 114 to 132 and improving the visitor experience with an updated food and beverage offer.
Working closely with client Fairview Hotels Ltd, DMA’s plan enhances the guest experience at this 4-star boutique hotel, adding 586sqm of extra floorspace through new side, rear and roof extensions plus a bar extension.
Explains Javier Ortega, for DMA:
“The main challenge was how to deliver the internal spaces to meet the client’s requirements whilst achieving an elegant series of extensions suitable for such a prestigious and sensitive site.”
DMA’s successful design uses high quality materials and architectural elements complimentary to the existing red and cream brick with Portland stone ornaments of the late Victorian / Edwardian hotel. Combined with a deliberate decluttering of miscellaneous distracting external elements, the new extension allows the hotel as a whole to engage more positively with the surrounding townscape and enhance the character and appearance of the Bloomsbury Conservation Area.
Continues Javier:
“As well as playing to our space planning expertise and creating spaces that will satisfy the expectations of the modern, savvy traveller, this project is another example of our contextual approach to design, rooting the hotel in its surrounding neighbourhood.”
The Mercure London Bloomsbury Hotel is the first of a series of Fairview Accor hotel projects on which DMA has been engaged to investigate expansion opportunities.