As with many other large cities post-pandemic, London has experienced a drop in office occupancy rates, with approximately 20 million square feet of unused space. At the same time, the city and its peers are looking for critical opportunities to reduce environmental impact and support thriving, resilient neighbourhoods.  

As we grapple with these challenges and seek to optimise the potential of adaptive reuse, we must consider the wider context of each community’s unique needs. The Hotel Amano, in London’s Covent Garden, highlights how thoughtful design can breathe new life into old buildings, strengthening urban neighbourhoods while advancing both sustainability and economic objectives. 

 Location and Brand 

Covent Garden, a neighbourhood in the West End of London, has undergone multiple shifts over the decades, from a red-light district, a modern wholesale distribution market, to a popular shopping and tourist destination, visited by over 43 million people each year. With each transformation, its buildings have been adapted to new purposes. 

In choosing London for the first international expansion of its luxury hotel brand, the AMANO Group—a German boutique lifestyle hotelier—was looking for a prime city centre site, similar to its locations in Berlin, Munich and Dusseldorf. Boasting a multitude of theatres, pubs, shops, museums, and markets, Covent Garden offers an attractive setting both day and night. With its brand of urban cool fitting in perfectly with the area’s cultural and historic vibes, Amano anticipated that both visitors and locals would be drawn to its distinctive design and immersive drinking and dining experiences, including its sky bar and rooftop terrace that provide expansive city views of London’s famous landmarks. 

Building purpose and performance  

Located directly across from the Theatre Royal, the building AMANO Group selected was developed in the 1980s as an office. It had 5 floors of workspace, along with an accessible rooftop.  

To transform the structure into a 141-bedroom hotel, our team had to identify the significant improvements needed to the building’s fabric, along with the technologies best-suited to both the design requirements and the client’s needs. This required a thorough understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of the building type, as well as the identification of critical no-go areas during the planning process. In this case, the generous spacing between levels/floor heights, typical of an office building, opened up more options for the room designs and aesthetics.  

Working with the client, we set clear upfront targets around outcomes and performance. To achieve their goals of high energy efficiency and sustainability, we increased air tightness and thermal efficiencies through a fabric-first approach, using high-efficiency air source heat pumps for thermal load and domestic hot water generation, implementing LED lighting, and ensuring occupancy demand controls. The result was a successful transformation that met both the client's needs and sustainability targets. 

Unlocking more opportunities 

Not every building is suitable for conversion into a hotel or other new use. However, where appropriate, adaptive reuse is a powerful approach to sustainable development that offers numerous benefits, from preserving historical structures to reducing environmental impact. The Hotel Amano, as a welcome addition to Covent Garden’s buzzy offerings, showcases the potential of this method in creating inspirational, modern spaces from existing buildings.

This article is part of our Adaptive London series, leading up to the publication of our 'Adaptive London: reusing existing buildings' research.