Hotelier Entering Europe Through Country's Tallest Building

LONDON-Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts will open its first hotel in Europe in the country’s tallest building. The Hong-Kong-based luxury hotel chain signed a 30-year lease for 18 floors in the upper half of the 70-story London Bridge Tower, set to open in 2009 on the South Bank of the Thames River. Shangri-La is the Asia Pacific’s leading hotel group, with 21,000 rooms in 46 hotels in key cities of Asia and the Middle East. In addition to expanding in Asia, a company source tells GlobeSt.com the London hotel is part of an effort to open hotels in key gateway cities for Asian tourists internationally. Other planned locations include Paris, Frankfurt, Seoul, Tokyo, Melbourne, New York City and Los Angeles. “Where Asians are traveling is where we want to be,” says the source.The mixed-use London Bridge Tower is a development of locally based Sellar Property Group, acting on behalf of Teighmore Limited, the joint venture owner of the site that includes Sellar, CLS Holdings plc (a fully listed property trust) and an undisclosed private family trust. The estimated construction cost is $653 million; the total development cost, which includes certain money for London Bridge and other soft costs, is closer to $1.2 billion, sources tell GlobeSt.com. Designed by internationally known architect Renzo Piano, the “Shard of Glass,” as it has become known, will contain shops, offices, restaurants, residential accommodations and public viewing galleries. The 185,000-sf hotel portion of the development–the first new-build five-star hotel in the Central London area in over a decade–will be situated on floors 34 to 52. The rooms will average 452 sf, making them some of the largest in London. Food and beverage outlets will include a specialty restaurant, lobby lounge and bar, and “food theater” café with a choice of multiple cooking stations. The hotel also will contain a high-end fitness facility and Shangri-La’s signature CHI spa, which combines Chinese and Himalayan healing therapies. Immediately below the hotel is a mid-level public piazza on floors 31 to 33 and, below that, 680,000 sf of lobby and office space. Immediately above the hotel is 70,000 sf of for-sale residential units on floors 53 to 65 and, above that, another public view gallery on floors 68 to 71. The building rises several additional stories, but the space will house the buildings cooling radiator, according to a diagram of the building. All told, the building will rise 1,016 feet, topping One Canada Square at Canary Wharf by nearly 600 feet and Commerzbank’s headquarters in Frankfurt by just under 400 feet.Including London, Shangri-La has 20 hotels under development. Unlike its previous hotels, only nine of which are third-party management agreements, more of the new hotels will be operated through management contracts. The change lowers investment risk and ensures development takes place more quickly. As a result, the company is on track to double the number of hotels it manages by 2009. In 2004, the company announced the development of its first hotel in North America, in Vancouver, BC, which is scheduled to open early 2008.