hospitalitystyle.com

(March 2009) posted on Mon Mar 02, 2009 EST

This themed hotel comes with a twist – it doesn’t shout ‘The Beatles.'

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By Matthew Hall

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The Beatles are big business in Liverpool, which has parlayed the Fab Four's local roots there into a thriving industry. An estimated half-million visitors a year flock to the northwest English town to walk through the childhood homes of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, go on the Magical Mystery Tour (which takes in such song sites as Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields) or do the hippy-hippy shake in a re-creation of the Cavern Club where The Beatles played their early gigs.

A relative newcomer to the circuit is the Hard Days Night Hotel, whose opening last year coincided with Liverpool's designation as the 2008 "European Capital of Culture." But the hotel's designers kept the references to John, Paul, George and Ringo relatively low key-more the mellow, album version of "Revolution," rather than the frenetic single version, if you will.

The reason: Bowdena Ltd., the consortium of local entrepreneurs bankrolling the hotel, wanted the four-star boutique property to also appeal to the steady stream of business travelers that visits Liverpool's sizable cadre of service-sector employers. "That meant steering clear of a Hard Rock Café/Planet Hollywood feel, and not overloading the space with memorabilia," says Steve Wragg, a senior designer with designLSM, the Brighton-based firm that created the hotel's interiors.

That philosophy is evident from the first glimpse of the $30 million project, which is housed in a 125-year-old former mercantile building. Falconer Chester Hall, the local architecture firm responsible for renovating the exterior and updating the interior infrastructure, left the granite-columned front façade pretty much intact. The only major Beatles-related feature designers added is the quartet of stone statues of each band member that's spaced equidistantly along a ledge 30 feet above street level.

Falconer Chester Hall also added a metallic-sided top floor of guest rooms to the building. That additional level gave the hotel a total of 110 rooms (and two suites), numbers the owners felt would provide the economies of scale needed for the project to succeed financially. But because conventional building materials would have been too heavy for the existing structure to support, Falconer Chester Hall opted to create the new floor out of a timber frame that's clad in lightweight zinc.