The Point A Hotel in Dublin has opened its doors after Morrison Design successfully completed the £11m design and build. Five-star guest reviews are pouring in with guests raving about the boutique, city centre hotel.
Morrison Design were the appointed architects for the project and have been involved right from project inception, creating all architectural design drawings that were submitted for planning applications. Working with QMK, Morrison Design helped to obtain planning approval and successfully overcame several planning objections related to the history of the site. Approval to go ahead with the hotel was finally granted in 2018.
QMK Dublin Ltd initially purchased the site with existing planning permission in place for a 95 bedroom hotel. Morrison Design Ltd then worked within the current approved scheme footprint and envelope to redesign and space plan the layout to generate an additional 35 bedrooms to obtain a total room count of 132, nearly a 40% room increase.
Morrison Design Ltd then sought to increase the number of guest rooms from 132 to 141 (a 48% increase) by redesigning the lower ground floor level that had been approved as meeting rooms to create nine new guest rooms with access to daylight via a lightwell. This approach would test Dublin’s planning stance of basement rooms being unacceptable.
Due to a lack of space, it is almost impossible to build new hotels or extensions in the City Centre and several prior planning applications had been refused from other hotel owners in Dublin who were desperate to increase capacity to fulfil the demand for accommodation.
Initially, the proposals met with disapproval from Dublin City Council who refused planning permission on the grounds that they believed that ‘basement rooms’ would not provide for an acceptable quality of development and that it would set an undesirable precedent.
The decision was appealed, and with supporting case studies from previous Morrison Design Ltd projects in London with lower ground rooms as well as daylight calculations based on the proposed Dublin rooms, it was proved that the recommended lower ground rooms are of comparable quality and daylighting to above-ground rooms. The appeal was successful and a first of its kind in Dublin.
Contractors from Sheahan & Collins Construction have been on the site since October 2019, operating in a tight site in a city centre location next to an operational hotel and roads which remain in use.
The Point A brand is owned by long standing clients of Morrison Design Architects based in Derby. The Queensway Group launched the Point A brand in 2017 and now operates 10 hotels in total, with a brand positioning offering cosy and comfortable hotel rooms in big cities at an affordable price.
Since its launch in Mid-November guests have rated the hotel 4.5* on review site Tripadvisor, with one guest writing: “the rooms are fantastic” and it was “a more modern experience”. Another guest said it was a “lovely modern hotel, 100% will be staying at each time we visit”.