For many years we had a close and active working relationship with The Savoy Hotel and have undertaken over 20 separate projects for five different owners. The Savoy is a Grade II listed building with an immensely rich heritage tradition with several ‘design firsts’, including the first Otis lift car in Britain – a listed structure in its own right – the first hotel to boast electrical lighting, bespoke glass ceilings made especially for bathrooms in the 1930s and its own bespoke branded ‘Savoy’ sanitary ware and beds. Even today the name Savoy is used throughout product design.
Our most important commission was to assist Fairmont Hotels, the current owners, in achieving the listed building consents for the major refurbishment of all 267-bedroom suites including incorporating new bathrooms in all rooms. To enable this adaptation, we undertook an extensive audit of all original key features that were to remain. For each room, we itemised the features and their period, as the Savoy had undergone three historically important refurbishments in 1910, 1936 and 1950. We then salvaged and created 14 historically accurate ‘facsimile’ rooms from each of these periods allowing the major adaptations of the other rooms to be consented.
