11
‘The plan is to build a 175-bedroom four-star hotel opposite the main Hopkins-designed Pavilion that would have the quality of media facilities needed for a test match’
meant McAleer & Rushe could not pour concrete for three weeks and a tragic site death, the grandstands were just about complete in time for the 2010 season, but the largest part of the second phase has been more of a challenge. The plan is to build a 175-bedroom four-star hotel opposite
the main Hopkins-designed Pavilion that would have the quality of media facilities needed for a test match. The cost of the hotel is £32.2 million but Rosebowl Plc had a sympathetic local authority in Eastleigh Borough Council. “There are two major revenue drivers for the borough:
the airport [known as Southampton but in Eastleigh] and the Rosebowl,” says Nick Rayner, the project architect at EPR, which has designed the hotel. “We worked closely with Eastleigh Borough Council and they have been tremen- dously supportive.” That support extended to not just granting planning permis-
sion, but also to the council agreeing to fund construction of the hotel itself, which will be leased back to the Rosebowl to find an operator. The ingenious approach that Rosebowl brought to the
funding of the golf course has also been applied to the design of the hotel. Mr Delve explains: “All the bedrooms will double up as a hospitality area and there’s a function suite that will become the press area. Everything double’s up.”
Drivers Jonas Deloitte is project manager for the overall
development and soon realised that finding an architect with experience of both hotels and stadia design was difficult. As a result, Miller Partnership, which has worked on stadia as diverse as the KC football and rugby arena in Hull to the Oval cricket ground in London, was brought in for the stand design with EPR recruited as masterplanners and designers of the hotel. An initial concern from the council’s planners early on was
that the hotel would not fit in with the rest of the Rosebowl. Mr Rayner explains: “[The council] wanted a holistic approach to what sports stadia can be. They are very different to a hotel and the curved steel and timber louvers are a device to tie the different elements of the design and the council warmed to that.” The new stands designed by Miller feature the same steel
and Cedar cladding that will also be used on the hotel, when work starts early in 2011, but that start was very nearly derailed early on. Government design watchdog, the Commission for
Architecture and the Built Environment, delegated a review of the scheme to its regional subsidiary, the Southern Area Design Panel (SADP). The main concern from the SADP was that the view from
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68