Program: A five-story, 347,125-square-foot hotel with a total of 246 guest rooms, 66 residential apartments, a presidential suite, a basement spa and pool, and retail space. The project, which backs up onto the Eurostar train station, is a restoration and expansion of a 19th-century Victorian Gothic railway hotel designed by George Gilbert Scott. A new five-story wing on the west side of the site contributes the majority (189) of the bedrooms.

Design concept and solution: RHWL and Richard Griffiths wanted to restore the interiors and highlight the building's details with minimal interference, and to integrate the new wing naturally into the site. The original hotel entrance was small and not centrally located, so the architects enclosed a covered taxi lane that goes through the hotel and turned it into a new reception concourse and function room. They retained the taxi route's sawtooth glass roof and added glass screens at either end of the passage. The brick exterior walls of the Scott building, with their arched windows, give the concourse an expansive indoor-outdoor feel reminiscent of the winter gardens popular in Victorian and Edwardian hotels. The architects replaced the sidewalks with Yorkstone and the taxi lane with a patterned wood floor, a nod to the wood-block street paving of the period. On the first floor RHWL and Richard Griffiths preserved the original guest rooms and suites, and on the second and third floors they converted some of the rooms into apartments. The fourth and fifth floor spaces became duplexes, with added height: the architects removed fifth-floor ceilings to expose the building's large roof timbers. Throughout the hotel they redid many of the original ceilings, restoring damaged plasterwork and re-creating elaborate stenciled patterns. For the new wing—a steel structure clad with brick—the architects designed a simplified version of the Scott arches. The stacked rows of arches shift in size and shape to accommodate a steel-truss bridge underneath, which brings passengers over the train station's delivery bay.

Completion Date: February 2011

Total construction cost: '140 million

Location: Euston Road, London NW1 2AR

Owner: Manhattan Loft Corporation

Architect:
RHWL Architects
Ivory House
St Katharine Docks
London
E1W 1AT
Tel: 020 7480 1500
Fax: 020 7481 4840