What the building was supposed to be
In 2010, on Marris Road, the brief was conventional and the client was firm: a commercial building for lease. Ground floor shops, upper floors offices, the same programme as a dozen buildings on the same road. I drew it that way, and Palm Tree Hotel opened its commercial life exactly as planned: two restaurants on the ground floor eventually, lifts, rentable floors.
The problem the market pointed out
Lease buildings earn what their tenants earn, and the tenants on that stretch were not earning what the building deserved. Through the meetings that follow, one thing became clear to me before it became clear to the owner: the building was too good for its tenants. The location, the floor plates, the two lifts, one passenger and one goods, the floor heights: this was a hotel's body wearing a shop's clothes.
I said so. More than once, across more than one year. The client resisted, and he was right to: a conversion is a bet of real money on a design argument. Commercial design teaches humility here better than any textbook: the client's first requirement might not fare well in practicality, and the market gives its feedback whether anyone asks for it or not.
The conversion, 2015
By 2015 the owner was ready, and the building was refactored in place. Half of the first and second floors became rooms. The party hall took three floors of the building's back. The terrace became a restaurant, which is the single highest-value decision in the project: the terrace restaurant earns from a view the building already had, and nobody had been charging for it.
Conversion is a strange craft. You are designing around decisions you made for a different brief five years earlier, and most of them turn out to have been right in ways you could not have predicted: the goods lift that was drawn for shop inventory now feeds hotel housekeeping; the lobby drawn for shop visitors now checks in guests.
What I would say to the client who is sure
The lesson I keep from this building is not that I was right. It is that the design argument deserved the five years it took. Some conversions you talk a client into, and the honest ones take as long as they take, because the money being argued about is his, and the building has to work as his business, not as my portfolio piece.
It became the landmark of that stretch of Marris Road, which neither of us predicted in 2010 and both of us will happily claim now.
The same adaptive-reuse logic, at different scales, has run through the renovation work ever since, and the record's hospitality buildings, from Golden Stone Resort to Hotel Avenue, are gathered in the work archive.