The world’s first whole life net zero carbon hotel will launch in Chiswick, West London, at the end of this year. The project is expected to be 89 percent more energy efficient that the typical UK hotel per square meter.
The hotel, dubbed room2 Chiswick, has been built with pioneering technologies to achieve net zero throughout both the design and construction stages, as well as throughout its whole life, including both embodied and operation emissions, which the company claims is an industry first.
The hotel will use onsite renewables to convert 100% of its energy needs for heating, cooling, and hot water. A proprietary intelligent building and reporting system will improve performance across the sum of incremental gains. Two “lab rooms” will provide data on energy, water use, and air quality, along with studying and learning from guest behaviors.
Bespoke loose furniture was made from FSC certified timber and was manufactured within 10 miles of the property, with 4,478 trees having been planted to offset the emissions.
Additional initiatives include:
- Occupancy enabled lighting, heating and cooling systems
- A ‘blue’ roof which can store 50,000 liters of rainwater to minimize local flooding
- A ‘green’ roof to increase local biodiversity
- A zero waste to landfill policy, including custom made in-room recycling bins for food waste, recycling and general waste
- Water purification system uses low heat technology that reduces the temperature needed to heat water by 30 degrees
- Piloting recycled li-ion battery cell M-BRIC technology to incorporate energy demand response and storage
- All unavoidable emissions balanced through verified nature-based carbon removal offsets
- A BREEAM excellent rating
The project will officially open in December.
Related Stories
| Aug 11, 2010
Luxury Hotel required faceted design
Goettsch Partners, Chicago, designed a new five-star, 214-room hotel for the King Abdullah Financial District (KAFD) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The design-build project, with Saudi Oger Ltd. as contractor and Rayadah Investment Co. as developer, has a three-story podium supporting a 17-story glass tower with a nine-story opening that allows light to penetrate the mass of the building.
| Aug 11, 2010
Westin Hotel
Mid-twentieth-century projects are in a state of limbo. In many cities, safeguards against quick demolition don't even cover “new” buildings built after 1939, yet many such buildings may be obsolete by current standards. The Farmers and Mechanics Savings Bank, located in downtown Minneapolis, was one such building, a rare example of architecture from a time when American design was ...
| Aug 11, 2010
Platinum Award: Monumentally Hip Hotel Conversion
At one time the tallest building west of the Mississippi, the Foshay Tower has stood proudly on the Minneapolis skyline since 1929. Built by Wilbur Foshay as a tribute to the Washington Monument, the 30-story obelisk served as an office building—and cultural icon—for more than 70 years before the Ryan Companies and co-developer RWB Holdings partnered with Starwood Hotels & Resor...
| Aug 11, 2010
AIA Course: Enclosure strategies for better buildings
Sustainability and energy efficiency depend not only on the overall design but also on the building's enclosure system. Whether it's via better air-infiltration control, thermal insulation, and moisture control, or more advanced strategies such as active façades with automated shading and venting or novel enclosure types such as double walls, Building Teams are delivering more efficient, better performing, and healthier building enclosures.
| Aug 11, 2010
Hilton President Hotel
Once an elegant and fashionably trendy locale, the Presidential Hotel played host to the 1928 Republican National Convention where Herbert Hoover was nominated for President, and acted as a hot spot for Kansas City Jazz in the '30s and '40s. The hotel was eventually abandoned in 1984, at which point it became a haven for vagabonds and pigeons, collecting animal waste and incurring significant s...
| Aug 11, 2010
CityCenter Takes Experience Design To New Heights
It's early June, in Las Vegas, which means it's very hot, and I am coming to the end of a hardhat tour of the $9.2 billion CityCenter development, a tour that began in the air-conditioned comfort of the project's immense sales center just off the famed Las Vegas Strip and ended on a rooftop overlooking the largest privately funded development in the U.
| Aug 11, 2010
Gold Award: Westin Book Cadillac Hotel & Condominiums Detroit, Mich.
“From eyesore to icon.” That's how Reconstruction Awards judge K. Nam Shiu so concisely described the restoration effort that turned the decimated Book Cadillac Hotel into a modern hotel and condo development. The tallest hotel in the world when it opened in 1924, the 32-story Renaissance Revival structure was revered as a jewel in the then-bustling Motor City.
| Aug 11, 2010
Silver Award: Palmer House Hilton Hotel & Shops Chicago, Ill.
Chicago's Palmer House Hilton holds the record for the longest continuously operated hotel in North America. It was originally built in 1871 by Potter Palmer, one of America's first millionaire developers. When it was rebuilt after the Great Chicago Fire it became the first hotel in the U.S. to put a telephone in every room.
| Aug 11, 2010
Gulf Coast Hotel's Stormy Road to Recovery
After his initial tour of the dilapidated 1850s-era Battle House Hotel, Ron Blount, construction manager with Retirement Systems of Alabama, said to his boss: “You need a priest more than you need a contractor.” Those words were more prescient to RSA's restoration of the historic Mobile landmark than he could have known at the time.
| Aug 11, 2010
Lifestyle Hotel Trends Around the World
When the Rocco Forte Collection opens the Verdura Golf & Spa Resort in Sicily in early 2009, the 200-room luxury property will be one of the world's newest lifestyle hotels. Lifestyle hotels cater to guests seeking a heightened travel experience, which they deliver by offering distinctive—some would say avant-garde, or even outrageous—architecture, room design, amenities, and en...
