Holiday Inn, Hemel Hempstead

We recently completed the multi-million-pound refurbishment project on Holiday Inn Hemel Hempstead for Cerberus, a client that Murray & Willis have worked for on many projects for the last 15 years.

From start to finish in 18 weeks we refurbished 152 bedrooms, the open lobby area, academy rooms and a restaurant. Comprising of a highly detailed and complex fast track project operating in a live and occupied building across all floor levels. This project represented a considerable delivery challenge requiring us to meet guaranteed programme end dates.

In order to minimise disruption, from the outset we as the principal contractor made the decision to establish internal hoarding to separate us from the hotel staff and guests. As well as this, in order for the hotel to remain operational we organised three phased handovers of the bedrooms, handing over circa fifty bedrooms every six weeks of the project.

Due to the complexity of this project it was paramount that communication was key throughout the duration and managing the phasing was critical. To achieve this successfully, we at the outset made the decision to appoint two full-time contract managers. One to manage the public areas and another to control the bedroom refurbishment. We felt this was a sensible approach as the areas and decision-making process between us, the professional team and the hotel staff worked better. As well as this, weekly site meetings were set up to enable our site team and contract managers to have the ability to adapt to the needs of the project.

We initially completely stripped-out and then fully refurbished all of the bedrooms. The scope of works in this phase included complete redecoration using our own in-house decorators installing ‘Muraspec’ high quality commercial wallpaper, a bespoke ‘Gaskell’ carpet design to the bedrooms and ‘ege’ carpet in the corridors which are compliant with IHG’s brand standard. As well as this, all the bedrooms had a complete re-wire.

The bathrooms throughout the 152 bedrooms received a full refurbishment, which consisted of re-grouting and replacing the showers and taps. In addition to this, all of the old pipework was stripped out and replaced. We replaced all of the toilet cisterns with new, eco-friendly water saving cisterns and then fitted a new hinged Corian cistern access lid. We refurbished all of the baths using a ‘Bath doctor’ and finished them off with fresh new silicon. We also managed alterations to all of the lighting, small power and data to suit the reconfigured bedrooms.