THE Bespoke Hotel Group is developing The Hotel Gotham at 100 King Street - the former bank with Jamie Oliver's Italian occupying the main banking hall.
Hotel Gotham promises to be a fun, witty destination and a little bit naughty. We want it to be the sexiest hotel in Europe
The hotel will sit above the restaurant in one of Manchester's most effortlessly beautiful buildings, the King of King Street, the best of its former banks.
The new luxury property will open in 2015, in collaboration with the Marshall Construction Group, the owners of the building.
Hotel Gotham - pavilions and perfection
The conversion to a hotel will result in the creation of 100 new jobs, both full and part time, with The Hotel Gotham featuring 60 deluxe rooms, alongside a restaurant and both a private members’ bar and garden situated on the roof of the building. Work will begin in March 2014, the hotel will open early Spring 2015.
“Hotel Gotham promises to be a fun, witty destination and a little bit naughty. We want it to be the sexiest hotel in Europe," says Bespoke Hotels chairman Robin Sheppard.
Speaking exclusively to Confidential Sheppard described the way the hotel will work.
"Guests will enter a lift off the street and then go straight to the top floor where there'll be a reception, bar and open terrace area with views across the city. To get to the bedrooms they'll go back down levels of the building. All the rooms will have external views with the exception of four internal suites that will be very special. These will be generously scaled filled with trick of the eye effects and faux gardens."
"What we're trying to achieve here is a high-end boutique hotel, something to match The Lowry Hotel for instance in terms of luxury," continues Sheppard. "But we also want colour and glamour; easy-going and accessible glamour. The restaurant for example will have high quality food but it won't be cold or too formal - and it will be very different from Jamie Oliver's place on the ground floor. In essence we want Hotel Gotham to very lively, we want it to reflect the city."
A Commercial Masterpiece - more about the building
The former Midland Bank was designed in 1928 (completed in 1935) with a brilliant white, fossil festooned, Portland Stone, facade. In terms of majesty allied with grace it is one of the top five commercial buildings ever built in Manchester.
Lutyens, by the time he designed the Grade II* bank, was in his fifties and already The Grand Old Man man of British architecture.
In the crammed and cramped Manchester city centre it works a different but equally potent magic.
Born in 1869, he began his career merging Arts and Crafts styles with vernacular UK architecture, after WWI he came up with the classic cenotaph design (Manchester's is one of his). His triumph was probably the masterplan and design of many of the buildings of New Delhi in India - in part collaboration with Herbert Baker. The Viceroy's House, now known as the Rashtrapati Bhavan, was perhaps his masterpiece.
For New Delhi he developed his own 'order' - how columns work with pediments and cornices and so on. One of his innovations was the use of little bells at the tops of columns. Called appropriately Delhi Bells, these can be viewed inside Jamie Oliver's Italian restaurant presently occupying the ground floor.
Lutyens was deliberately tricky, almost playful, in his later buildings. Here the structure recedes in thirds, the bottom stage a third bigger than the second and so on. He also mingled the powerful but subtle neo-Baroque of Christopher Wren and his contemporaries with newer influences spreading about the nature of architecture in the 1920s.
There might be huge Classical arches here and massive cornices and obelisks, but much of the wall space is sheer, the window apertures unadorned, functional, to the point. Bauhaus eat your heart out.
Sculpture from John Ashton Floyd pushes coats of arms and Midland Bank insignia out from the walls in relief.
The top third of the building could be a French pavilion from the age of Louis XIV. It has attached columns, massive windows.
On the Pierhead at Liverpool the ex-Midland Bank would look perfect, a suitable match for the Three Graces. It's an Imperial Building, a building for Empire days, just as they are.
100 King StreetIn the crammed and cramped Manchester city centre it works a different but equally potent magic.
We are the city of the short perspective, the closed view. The buildings close about us, streets shift or change name in unpredictable ways. This can be frustrating but is also claustraphobically exciting.
History dictates the street pattern. Manchester's development as the primal, industrial city, a commercial machine first and foremost, meant that wide boulevards were an idle irrelevance in the pursuit of profit. Thus we are left with the delightful, tight-packed, bedlam of our city centre.
So coming upon a view of Lutyen's Midland bank down Charlotte Street or Spring Gardens gives a lift to the day. It's the contrast that gives value to the whole.
The building's grandeur and scale is a sudden shock given the narrow streets on three sides - it's like coming on a medieval cathedral, York say, or Toledo, after wandering down mean streets filled with shadow.
The name of the new hotel is playful, resonant of Batman, Manhattan and the heyday of the skyscraper from the twenties to the fifties. Hotel Gotham as a name feels all right - bit daft but eye-catching.
This development is great news for the city centre.
Jonathan Schofield
You can follow Jonathan Schofield on Twitter here @JonathSchofield or connect via Google+
King of King Street
Inside the Banking Hall - now Jamie Oliver's Italian
