EXCLUSIVE | Inside The Volta Boy's New Palace Hotel Project

Confidentials 4 May 2016

IT might seem a stretch to ask a couple of DJs to successfully re-invent an iconic city centre hotel, but the more you talk to Luke Cowdrey, the more you believe it’s actually the most natural progression in the world.

It’s a big gig, like playing Wembley, but the backers have shown confidence in something that is local...

From 1995-2008, Luke and his business partner Justin Crawford (main image) ran pioneering club night ‘Electric Chair’, where they’d create original eight hour sets featuring all different types of music; tech, jazz, hip-hop and funk, with carefully sourced guest DJs. As part of ‘The Unabombers’, the duo travelled the world creating music events, experiences and festivals, whilst soaking up international cafe culture. What geeky attention to detail they picked up using light, sound and atmosphere in order to stimulate the senses, they’ve now applied to food, drink and restaurant fit-outs. They’ve gone from passionate amateurs, to knowledgeable hospitality operators in two short decades.

They opened their first bar-café Electrik in Chorlton in 2009, because 'Justin quite fancied having his own neighbourhood bar'. After serving a few successful Sunday lunches, they began to get more into the food offering. Four years later, they opened the award-winning Volta in West Didsbury. With the help of Chef Alex Shaw - Manchester Food & Drink Festival's Chef of the Year 2015 - Volta continues to gather praise for it’s globally influenced menu of small sharing dishes, reflecting the culinary influences and more relaxed dining style Luke and Justin experienced over the years.

The Palace, Oxford Street

Now they’ve been brought onboard to assist in the major £25m ‘urban lifestyle’ refurbishment and rebrand of the 275 bed Palace Hotel on Oxford Street. Hotel owners Starwood Group want to create an all-day, open-plan restaurant, bar and lobby experience and they recognise that simply hiring some London rock ‘n roll chef, putting him in a corner and saying ‘welcome to Manchester’ was not the best way to go about it.

Starwood enrolled the services of hospitality consultants The Gorgeous Group whose Mancunian founder Robbie, has been a regular customer of Volta for years. He recognised that Luke and Justin would be able to help them create the type of all-day eating and drinking space they wanted - a creative local hub in this underutilised and iconic space.

We caught up with Luke, who gave us a hard hat and a neon yellow vest and showed us round the site, “I love the fact that you can go into these relaxed and inclusive hotel places like the Hoxton in London or places in Amsterdam, for a coffee and just stay all day on your computer, have a little bite to eat, then maybe have a cocktail, and meet people in the restaurant later,” he told us. “So when they suggested it to us, we thought ‘wow, we’d really love to do that.’”

Luke Cowdrey, The Palace Hotel

So how involved have they been in the project and how much of a say will they have? “We came on board in ‘chapter 3’ of the renovation and have had a hand in the design, even down to what people will be dressed in. We are after natural, not contrived, very relaxed human experience with no pomp, but at the same time we will raise the bar and the service will be as important as the food.”

“We are going to curate a huge, open, multi-faceted 10,000 sq ft lobby space which is going to be open 24hrs. It will incorporate a winter garden where cream teas will be served, as well as a den area, a restaurant and a bar. Food is only one part of it. We don’t want a boxed off restaurant in the corner with linen. Once you go in it is like a whole little world in itself. It’s going to be about bringing people to it, not just people from the hotel, but people involved in music and happenings, events and the arts.”

The intention is to create a new Manchester hub where plans and happenings that influence the city can occur. They are keen to celebrate the city’s creativity but in a more forward thinking way – there’ll be no mosaics or images of George Best adorning the walls of this stunning iconic space.

Work on the project is well underway

“We are minnows compared to the bigger operators in town and internationally”, added Luke, “So we are well aware of the scale of the opportunity being thrown at us. It’s a big gig, like playing Wembley, but the backers have shown confidence in something that is local and hasn’t necessarily had the operational experience of the big boys. We can make this work.”

What can Luke tell us about plans for the food? “We’d struggle opening a fine dining restaurant. The Volta vision is the one they brought us in for but, because it’s much bigger than 32 people in Didsbury, there will be a Viagra boost to widening the menu to suit up to 139 covers wanting all-day dining. We want to offer good honest cooking; we’re not trying to be cleverer than that, serving complicated dishes with smoke coming out of Astroturf. Our sharing concept will still feature heavily but our chargrill will allow for a much wider offering. That’s all we can tell you.”

The chef in charge of running the restaurant has not yet been named, but they will be a crucial part of the holistic approach to the modern urban hotel experience.

"We don’t want a boxed off restaurant in the corner with linen"

Luke and the team are keen to bring a new generation of people to this sleeping giant, “most people might be familiar with the landmark clock tower, but might not even know about its history and the beautiful aesthetic inside of this place.”

We’ll leave the history of the stunning terracotta grade II listed building by Victorian architect Alfred Waterhouse to Jonathan Schofield below, because its original incarnation as The Refuge Assurance Company is worth a feature on its own. In brief, they’ve stripped back; revealing and exposing many original features such as richly glazed decorative tiles, brickwork, clocks, wood panelling, metalwork, sweeping bronze and marble staircases.

We’ll keep you updated as the project progresses and as the name and chef are revealed, but for now we can't wait to see what Cowdrey and Crawford can conjur up come September, in what promises to be the most remarkable reinvention of the year.

A potted Palace history: Dominating everything at the Oxford Street and Whitworth Street junction is the Palace Hotel, formerly the Refuge Assurance building, an insurance company. One of the most colourful descriptions ever given to a Manchester building is CR Reilly’s from 1924, who thought it resembled ‘a tall young man in flannel trousers escorting two charming but delicate old ladies in lace’.

It was built in stages between 1891 and 1930. The first part, by Town Hall architect Alfred Waterhouse, rose at the corner of Oxford Road and Whitworth Street where the doorway is capped by a terracotta castle, a symbol of security for those trusting their money with the Refuge Assurance. There’s dazzling tilework just inside the porch, often with an intertwined RA. There’s more tile work inside the main lounge, while the huge 1910 entrance under the 66m (217ft) clocktower is equally impressive. The quarters on the clock tower feature a stylised Manchester bee.

The roof of the building was chosen for the closing scene of classic British film noir, Hell is a City, with Stanley Baker, from 1959. The Refuge Assurance left for the suburbs in 1987 and the building was eventually taken over as a hotel.