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Architects wake up to appeal of Sleeperz Newcastle

Sleeperz Hotel Newcastle, a reinvention of a classic railway hotel in Newcastle city centre, has been shortlisted for a prestigious award by the Royal Institute of British Architects.

Sleeperz Newcastle – the 98-bedroom premium budget hotel near Newcastle Central Station – has caught the attention of judges at RIBA, whose awards honour buildings that achieve the highest architectural standards and make a substantial contribution to the local environment.

The sleek glass fronted hotel opened on Newcastle’s Westgate Road in January on the site of a derelict former Parcel Works close to Central Station.

Sleeperz Hotels, a fast growing innovative UK budget hotel operator, specialises in building stylish design-led hotels on unusually shaped land in city-centres near mainline railway stations.

It opened its first hotel in Cardiff in 2008 and has plans to open new hotels in Birmingham, London and Manchester by 2015.

David Myers, chief executive of Sleeperz Hotels, said: “We are passionate about creating hotels that are beautiful landmark buildings located in Britain’s leading city centres. To be shortlisted for this prestigious architectural award less than six months since opening our Newcastle hotel is proof that we are achieving our goals.”

The property has been nominated in the RIBA Hadrian Awards, the regional awards for the North East, from which the winners are put forward for the national RIBA Awards. The winners of those awards are considered for the RIBA Stirling Prize.

The hotel will find out whether it has won the award at the RIBA Hadrian Awards ceremony in Leeds later this month.

“Our Newcastle hotel is a welcome addition to the capital of the North East region. The building is sleek, modern and stylish and blends naturally into a city scape boasting iconic buildings and landmarks including Newcastle Castle Keep, St James’ Park football ground, the Tyne Bridge and the Georgian architecture on Grey Street,” said Mr.Myers.

It is not the first time that Sleeperz approach to building hotels has caught the attention of RIBA. In 2010, its landmark Cardiff hotel won the RIBA Wales Award.

Martin Knight, chair of the RIBA Awards judges 2010, said: “The whole Sleeperz operational model is an innovation and the resulting construction cost per room suggests many more sites could be made to work with this sort of thinking and with clever design tailored to small sites.

This is not back-to-basics architecture but possibly a reinvention of the city-centre hotel model for a money-conscious world.“

Both the Cardiff and Newcastle properties are designed by award-winning architects Clash Associates, who have succeeded in making the hotels into modern, highly-visible and instantly recognisable buildings.

For more about Sleeperz, visit: www.sleeperz.com

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Matthew Moore .