MANCHESTER'S hotel industry is rampant.
"Think high ceilings, exposed oak beams, huge walnut sash windows, antique mercury glass, and bronze chandeliers"
The city's tourism industry is now worth a whopping £7bn (up from £4.6bn in 2005), passenger numbers at Manchester Airport are up nearly 25% since 2010, whilst the city is gunning for Edinburgh as the UK's second most popular city for foreign visitors.
No surprise then that 2014 was the best year ever for Manchester hotels with average annual occupancy near 80%, outperforming nearly every other European city. By 2017 the city will boast just over 11,000 hotel rooms - 6000 more than a decade ago.
Still, when a friend recently asked me to recommend a "quirky boutique hotel in Manchester for under £100 - something like The Hoxton in London - we can't find anything on Mr & Mrs Smith", I was stumped.
Velvet? "We don't fancy Canal Street at the weekend" (fair enough). The new Abel Heywood? "Not above a pub". Macdonald Town House or Great John Street? "£250 a night - we're not Kimye!"
Well, that's your boutique lot (for now at least, King Street Townhouse and Hotel Gotham will also add to the mix this year) - not hugely impressive for Britain's 'second city'.
Cow Hollow - 57 Newton Street
That's where Mr Muj Rana hopes Northern Quarter's new £1.5m boutique Cow Hollow Hotel (due to open in mid-2015) can fill in.
"The area has always lacked a room-only, design-focused, affordable boutique hotel," Rana tells me, "more in line with those in cities such as London, Barcelona and Hong Kong.
"We want to step away from traditional opaque hotel pricing with flat rates all year round," he adds, "£69 per night during weekdays and £89 at weekends, and that includes breakfast!
"We're not starting a 'concept'. It's a reversion to what hotels should be: simple but luxurious, affordable but consistent."
The seventeen-room Cow Hollow - offering kingsize Hypnos beds, rainfall showers, Apple TVs and 'properly fluffy slippers' - will occupy the former Victorian textile warehouse next door to the Police Museum at 57 Newton Street.
"Being a huge architecture and design fan, the look has mostly been created in-house," Rana tells me. "We're combining the Victorian look of the building with an Old-English, colonial style design. Think high ceilings, exposed oak beams, huge walnut sash windows, antique mercury glass, and bronze chandeliers."
Cow Hollow
Rana - whose family runs a number of salons and restaurants around the city - has been battling through a web of planning and building regulations since their first announcement back in September 2013.
"We were adamant we wanted to be in the Northern Quarter," Rana tells me. "It took a year to find the right site, and sitting in the Stevenson Square Conservation Zone has naturally been challenging from a development perspective, but worth it for character it will add to the hotel."
That name though?
"It's an area of San Francisco," Rana explains. "My fiance and I holidayed there and felt it echoed the laid-back vibe of the Northern Quarter and what we hoped to bring to Manchester."
Cow Hollow Hotel is due to open in mid-2015 at 57 Newton Street, Northern Quarter, M1 1ET.
