HOTEL DEVELOPMENTS
SITTING PRETTY – STACKABLE HOTELS
Winning the Best Retail/Leisure Project of the Year at the Offsite Awards 2018, the Holiday Inn Express (HIEx) hotel in Trafford City, Manchester is a 220-bedroom hotel constructed using offsite volumetric modular methods.
1 The hotel, located next to Manchester’s EventCity venue on a 1.75 acre site, was a joint venture between Topland, Marick and Mill Lane Estates and is the first Holiday Inn Express ‘Generation 4’ in the UK to be built using a modular construction process. All 220 bedrooms have been constructed under factory conditions, creating steel-based, volumetric modules complete with fully factory-finished
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interior furniture and fixtures and fittings, including carpets, curtains, wallpaper and full-height windows. Architect, Chapman Taylor’s Manchester studio, worked alongside the main contractor, Bowmer & Kirkland to see the modules stacked on top of each other without the need for additional supporting structures, to enable fast installation onsite.
WWW.OFFSITEMAGAZINE.CO.UK | JULY/AUGUST 2018
Each module consisted of two bedrooms and a section of corridor, with all of the 220 bedrooms placed on site in less than three weeks, ready for external cladding to commence. The fixtures and fittings, having been produced and installed in a controlled factory environment, were of a very high standard – inspected and signed off before being delivered. This meant that quality assurance was in place