Brand new 350-room Travelodge Budget Luxe hotel opens in historic London Docklands
Studio Moren is celebrating the completion of a new-build 18-storey, 350-room landmark Travelodge hotel in the East India Dock area of London Docklands. The hotel development is a joint venture between Tarragon Development Limited, Marick Real Estate and Mill Lane Estates. The new flagship Travelodge hotel has been designed by Studio Moren to reflect the industrial history of the site and its surrounding architecture.
The new London Docklands hotel is Travelodge’s first new-build premium look and feel budget luxe hotel design. This new design has been created on the success of the group’s budget chic hotel format, TravelodgePLUS with feedback from the company’s largest consumer study – which surveyed around 5,000 UK business and leisure travellers to find the psychographics of the modern budget traveller. Key findings revealed that modern travellers crave style, choice and little homely touches to make it easier to work, rest and relax both inside and outside of the room.
The 350-room London Docklands Travelodge hotel features on-site restaurant called the Bar Café, a car park and a range of family, double and assessable budget-luxe and Super Rooms (The company’s premium economy room format). Rooms offer scenic views of the O2, The Thames and Canary Wharf. This is also the most sustainable Travelodge hotel with a BREEAM Excellent rating, an Energy Performance Certificate rating of A and a number of sustainable features which include solar panels on the roof, air source heat pumps and electric vehicle charging points.
Sustainability and carbon reduction have been one of the key drivers of Studio Moren’s design. The scheme offers an active and inclusive enhanced public realm, delivering a net-gain in the ecological value of the site, post construction, owing to the higher distinctiveness and biodiversity value of the proposed habitats, rather than the species-poor habitats on the existing site.
The articulation and materiality of the base provides a simple grounding whilst a giant concrete-effect beam and corner columns produce the impression that the weight of the tower is distributed to each corner of the podium. By contrast, the light, glazed restaurant element has the feeling that it is hanging from the structure above. The double-height entrance glazing, combined with the generous double-height entrance area, unambiguously defines the building’s main entrance.
The middle volume of the tower is articulated with materials evocative of giant steelwork sections reflecting the local industrial maritime history. The material palette for the top floors of the building is metal and glass, creating variety through differing colours and textures. The top floor crowns the building with an elegant composition of narrowing folded aluminium cladding and increased grey perforated metal infill.
Achieving a BREEAM ‘Excellent’ rating, the hotel features a biodiverse brown roof, air source heat pumps, solar PV arrays as well as a pocket park at the grand entrance area, providing amenity space for the public, hotel staff and hotel guests. An attractive pedestrian walkway enhances the existing public realm located along the cycle super highway which borders the site. A 1100sq m green hedge buffer and a corner park contains a selection of native species, as well as a memorial for the former dock wall.
The Travelodge budget-luxe design also includes a number of sustainable initiatives, such as carpet made from recycled fishing nets as part of a project to support clean ocean initiatives. The carpet backing is also made of old plastic bottles. Other features include low energy lighting, motion sensing controls and aerated showers and taps.