Guide
How to Choose a
Hotel Architect.
Six questions worth asking before you appoint anyone, and what a good answer sounds like. Written from the other side of the table, which is where the useful version of this advice lives.
Ask what they have finished,
not what they have drawn.
Renderings are cheap and a portfolio of unbuilt work tells you nothing about whether a practice can get a building approved, costed and standing. Ask for completed projects, with the year and the client's name against each.
Then go and stay a night in one. A hotel that has been trading for a decade will tell you in a single evening what no meeting can: whether the corridors work at seven in the morning, whether the banquet crowd meets the check-in queue, whether the plant is where it should be. It is the one reference that cannot be curated for you.
Ask who draws the structure
and the services.
On most hotel projects the architect draws the building and four other consultants draw the structure, the electrical and plumbing, the fire fighting and the interiors. Someone then has to reconcile the five sets of drawings, and on a bad day that someone is you.
Ask directly whether those disciplines are in the same office. If they are not, ask who carries the cost when a beam lands where a duct was supposed to run.
Ask what the site
will actually carry.
Before anything else, an architect worth appointing should be able to tell you what the development control rules permit on your plot — how much you can build, how high, how far from the boundary, and therefore roughly how many keys the business plan can assume.
If a practice will not give you a view on that until they are appointed, they either do not know or do not want to tell you. Both are worth knowing early.
Ask how the money works
per room.
A hotel is measured in saleable area per floor plate and in operating cost per key. Ask how their plan compares on both. An architect who talks only about the elevation and the lobby has not thought about the twenty years after you open.
Ask who will actually
be on your project.
Practices win work with a principal and staff it with a junior. Ask who draws it, who visits site, and how often. Then ask how far the office is from your plot, because that answer sets the real frequency regardless of what anyone promises.
Ask what went wrong
on the last one.
The most useful question on this list. Every hotel project has a problem — a ruling that changed, a contractor who failed, a monsoon that arrived early. An architect who says nothing ever went wrong is either inexperienced or not being straight with you.
What you are listening for is whether they saw it coming, and what they did about it.
Bring Us the Site.
The reading above is free and so is the first conversation. Send what you have and we will tell you what it can carry.