I am currently part of a team working with an innovative boutique hotel brand on Seattle’s first modular hotel. To be located in the city’s next central business district, South Lake Union, the hotel will consist of 264 fully-prefabricated rooms on top of a site-built ground-floor amenity level. Construction is due to be complete in the summer of 2018.
Affordable luxury that serves the mobile generation of travelers is the concept that drove ever aspect of the brand’s highly-tailored experience. Rather than large, empty guest rooms and minimal amenity spaces that typify most large hotels, the idea here is to provide the guest with a comfortable, highly efficient 154 sq ft sleeping room that is complimented by large stylish amenity spaces on the ground floor for social exchange and interaction. The rooms deliver extra-large beds, customizable mood lighting, and generous tech offerings, while the amenity floor offers multiple living rooms and gathering spaces with a lively 24/7 bar and grab-and-go food.
The structure of the hotel is a hybrid of prefabricated and site-built elements. Up to the second floor, the building will be a conventional column and beam structure erected on a cast-in-place concrete foundation. The elevator core and egress stair towers will also be site-poured concrete. The rest of the structure above the second floor, however, will be composed entirely of pre-fabricated units. These units, to be built in Poland and shipped to Seattle, will arrive fully sealed and finished on the interior and will be stacked into place by crane. The technical challenges in designing a hybrid structure like this are significant. Construction tolerances are much smaller than usual when employing prefab modules, and coordinating MEP and structural systems must be resolved at a much earlier stage of the project than is typical. Building in a high-seismic zone like Seattle was also a major technical hurdle to overcome. The project team and myself learned a great deal from a project that we believe will help define a dynamic area of the city.
MATTHEW MARANO 