interview
contemporary architecture. “We decided on a specialist rustic-looking brick called Hectic, made by Wienerberger, a company with strong environmental credentials,” explains Graham. “The grey colour is created by the post-manufacturing process, which involves soaking the bricks in petrol and setting them alight to giving them their distorted characteristic. And the addition of the gold window reveals is our nod to the history and heritage of the Jewellery Quarter,” he says. Inside, style touches are everywhere from
the totemic bloc signage positioned perpendicularly above the sliding glass entrance door, to the reception lounge’s array of white cuboid lighting shades (a theme picked up in the bedroom lighting) and the vertical pink luminescent room number strips. All rooms are priced at £55 a night or £60
for a window. How have Boxbuild managed to merge affordability and quality so convincingly? “We’ve pulled away all the elements that we felt were unnecessary, such as swimming pools, gyms, restaurants, mini bars and such. Stripping these back allows us to focus on delivering five-star quality in the rooms, which is ultimately what the short stay or business traveller wants,” explains Graham. Extensive work with a Scandinavian sleep
research centre enabled Boxbuild to determine the precise room conditions that
should create the optimal environment for a good night’s sleep and implement them throughout the hotel. They’ve also given all the room fittings an edge by over-specifying in most areas. These include the Italian tiled wet room and drench shower, which says Graham, allows the perfect control of temperature settings and a water pressure that exceeds industry standards. Each room also features significant sound insulation and
there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a five-star finish for the price we’re offering
noise reduction materials in the walls, luxurious linens and a top of the range, environmentally sensitive air conditioning unit, set at 18-200C degrees and 30-400C for optimum humidity. At 2.5m long and 1,600mm wide, the
European king-size beds are bigger than standard UK sizing, and sit alongside the latest 32” inch LED flat screen TV, super fast Wi-Fi and soothing bespoke Italian ambient lighting, personally selected by Graham after visiting Italy to source them.
“There’s no reason why you shouldn’t
have a five-star finish for the price we’re offering. The location of Bloc St Paul’s means guests don’t need the usual extras, and this will form a feature of our future projects,” he says. And there’s no reason why the concept shouldn’t boast strong environmental credentials either. “Energy efficiency has always been important for us and we’ve made some big strides towards our aims in this first project,” says Graham. “Bloc St Paul’s utilises heat regeneration in the showers and air-conditioning and we have installed energy efficient lighting throughout the building, while each of the modules are heat and sound insulated. “We’re moving ever closer to a
Passivhaus hotel concept and are working alongside BREEAM now. Solar power and ground source heat pumps are likely to feature in future builds,” he says. The company plans to launch another nine hotels within the next three years. And it’s this meeting of luxury and style with affordability that Graham believes will reap rewards in the future for the Bloc concept. “One of the benefits of our hotels is
their flexibility. We can pretty much go anywhere, from a Victorian façade to an office block and do not require the space that other sites need as we’ve cut most of the unnecessary elements of competing city hotels.”
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