After opening its first hotel in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter four years ago a pioneering hotel company has confirmed it is looking for a second site in the city.
Bloc Hotels — which constructs its guest rooms off site before installing them in its hotels — is already in the process of adding another 31 apartment-rooms to the rear of its existing 73-bedroom premises in Caroline Street.
Inspired by Japan’s capsule hotels, Bloc opened its second location at Gatwick Airport in 2014 by transforming the former EasyJet training centre into a £7m 245-room hotel. That site, which allows guests to use their tablets and smartphones to control their room’s functions such as lighting and heating, is also being extended by more than 150 bedrooms.
Bloc co-founder, Colin Graham, says demand in Birmingham both from tourists and business users has grown steadily since 2011. He is also looking to build Bloc hotels in other key cities.
“We are working on a couple of sites in London, neither of which have come off yet, and we’re hoping to get another site in Birmingham for a mixture of the two types of rooms which is how we see the business now going forward,” he explained.
“We are quite close on the one in Birmingham. I can’t say where it is, but it’s a good, prime location.” Graham, who also had a hand in designing and fitting out Birmingham’s Radisson Blu hotel, has also looked closely at a possible Liverpool site.
“We have received a lot of offers to do things all over the place, but we need to get our grounding here first. We are aiming to have ten or more UK sites up and running before we think about spreading our wings and going abroad.” He admitted moving into mainland Europe would be the logical step rather than the United States where the competition is stronger.
All Bloc rooms contain the traditional facilities such as en-suite bathrooms and televisions, but their uniform size allows developers to fit more rooms into a building. “The apartment-rooms, which we are adding at Caroline Street, are double the size of the standard hotel room but are still small for an apartment,” Graham adds.
“They will be the same size in square metres as a hotel room in somewhere like a Travelodge, but you get everything you would expect in an apartment such as desk, bedroom, bathroom, microwave, sink and fridge.
“They will also be an apartment-hotel rather than serviced apartments as you still get all the benefits of the hotel such as reception at the front.”
