Village Urban Hotel, Portsmouth

The hotel has 153 rooms, conference facilities and a leisure club with a 20m swimming pool, gym and fitness studios.

It represents the debut of the new Village Hotel concept, as designed by 3DReid, which delivers an evolution of the current Village Urban Resort offer on a more compact footprint; providing potential for the company to expand into more central urban areas, where sites are, generally, smaller in size.

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Iain Stackhouse, of Village Hotels, says:

“We knew that there was a real need for more hotel space in the city and, prior to applying for planning, spoke to many businesses and organisations who believed a lack of hotel provision was holding back the city’s economic development.”

Hotel specialists

This project was remarkable for the level of collaboration and innovation used in constructing this striking new hotel for developer Village Hotels three miles from Portsmouth

The hotel provides 153 bedrooms, conference facilities and leisure club with a 20m swimming pool on the site. Exhibiting a funky, boutique feel, the front-of-house areas were constructed with open soffits exposing the services.

The project required building a world class gym facility, aerobics studio and spin studio – one of just four of its type in the country – above a pub, restaurants and commercial kitchen on the ground floor.

We were brought into the project at an early stage, enabling us to lead the design team to optimise the build. We helped find a solution that allowed the customer to switch bedroom layouts so the bathrooms were next to the external windows – a first for the hotel operator - and a change which allowed it to fit in four extra rooms per floor, increasing potential income.

We use a hot-rolled steel frame for the lower floors and a lightweight steel frame for the upper bedroom floors, where prefabricated panels were simply bolted together on-site. This formed complete internal and external walls, an innovative technique meaning fit-out could commence four weeks earlier than more traditional frame methods.

We centralised the M&E plant onto the hotel roof, increasing the usable space on other floors. Central to this solution was the utilisation of an off-site prefabricated plant room, cutting the M&E installation to the roof from ten to six weeks. A new approach was also used for the swimming pool with a sprayed concrete solution being adopted rather than cast in-situ box, again cutting time and cost.

Our sustainability standards exceeded the customer’s requirements, with 99.7% of waste diverted to landfill. We trained a technical apprentice and let supply chain partners bring theirs, with 783 apprentice hours gained.

The Considerate Constructors’ Scheme scored the site 44 and 45; “exceptional”, calling it a beacon for best practice with “all the project team … fully committed to CCS performance at the highest level.”

Hotel sector

This hotel adds to our hotel track-record which also includes several Premier Inns, the new Dorsett City Hotel in London, Novotel in Brentford and Travelodge in Docklands. To see more, visit here.

MD for our southern Homes Counties business Roger Forsdyke:

"Our knowledge is ideally suited to the hotel sector, where we have the teams to quickly built top quality hotels that meet the demanding brand standards of clients that want to differentiate themselves from other large chains."

Big expansion plans

The new hotel in Lakeside New Harbour, Portsmouth, is one of a pipeline of new hotels for Village Hotels as they expand across the country.

Founded in 1995 Village Urban Hotels has 28 locations throughout the UK so far, the company has proved very popular due to its wide-ranging food and beverage offering as well as its sports and leisure facilities.

Roger Forsdyke, managing director of construction in the Cobham office:

“We are very proud of our track record in the hotel sector and are delighted to be working with Village Urban Hotels. We are looking forward to using our vast experience in the hotel sector to help our client create a unique and first-class hotel experience for its customers.”

You can find out more about the hotel by visiting https://www.village-hotels.co.uk/hotels/portsmouth/