St Colme Street hotel conversion, Edinburgh

SDE was appointed by the project architect to provide full mechanical and electrical design services for the conversion of a traditional office building into a boutique hotel within Edinburgh city centre.

The project required careful integration of modern building services within an existing structure, across guest accommodation, public areas and back-of-house facilities.

A hotel is a harder services problem than the office it replaces. Guest rooms need en-suite drainage and water, ventilation and independently controllable heating and cooling in a structure that was never planned around vertical service routes, and the acoustic separation a hotel requires is a services question as much as a fabric one — plant noise, duct-borne crosstalk and drainage noise all reach the bedroom.

Domestic hot water is the load that tends to decide the plant strategy, because hotel demand peaks hard in the morning and the storage and plant space to meet it have to be found somewhere in a building already fixed in size.

Working under a traditional procurement route, the design team developed coordinated and energy-efficient solutions suitable for the building's new use.